Resumen de Blue dye thinking
You have probably seen The Great Wave off Kanagawa--the Japanese woodblock print of a huge, foaming wave about to engulf a group of small boats. It's no surprise that the picture is mostly blue; it is a wave after all. However, it is part of a series of images called Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji by the artist Hokusai, and if you flick through them, you will notice that nearly every one is predominantly blue. That might seem strange, until you realise that in 1830, when Hokusai began printing these works, blue was rather a new thing. The colour blue has proved such a problem to recreate that most ancient cultures don't seem to have had a word for it--Homer famously describes the wine-dark sea. Only the ancient Egyptians are known to have had one, and it's probably no coincidence that they alone were able to produce a blue pigment.
