Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/19/the-forbes-pigment-collection.html
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But what if an art forger needs reference materials? This is so elitist.
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Next you’ll be wanting Tyrian purple and royal blue. Down, peasent! /s
Or worse, aluminum!
“There is nothing harder than to make people use a mew metal. Luxury items and ornaments cannot be the only sphere of its application. I hope the time will come when aluminum will serve to satisfy the daily needs.” ~ Henri Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville, 19th century French chemist and guy who really should’ve been more careful what he wished for
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The former chemist in me says, “Ooooooh! Preeeeeety!”
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That first paragraph has more than a soupcon of ‘has anyone gone so far as to even want to look like’. Either that, or someone has spiked my drink with ketamine.
ETA: aaaaah, you can only see the strikethrough on the main page. As you were, @beschizza, as you were.
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“Wow, that’s a really interesting colour! What is it?”
“Toxic.”
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Actually, I’m jonesing for mummy brown.
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It’s curious how many colors intersect a history involving something ethically dubious.
Robbing Egyptian graves 
Lead poisoning makeup
Poor diet for cows
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all the poor art forgers I know hand make their own pigments and live in the woods with their beast friends to protect them from governmental tracker agents.
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The greatest forger of all time? Satan.
“‘The Ape of God,’” Elias said. "A medieval theory about the Devil. That he apes God’s legitimate creation with spurious interpolations of his own. That’s really an exceedingly sophisticated idea, epistemologically speaking. Does it mean that parts of the world are spurious? Or that sometimes the whole world is spurious?Or that there are plural worlds of which one is real and the others are not? Is there essentially one matrix world from which people derive differing perceptions? So that the world you see is not the world I see?”
― Philip K. Dick, The Divine Invasion
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I always wondered how a person came up with the idea to grind up Egyptian mummies and turn the dust into a pigment.
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Reading the title, I was expecting to see a variety of white skin tone color swatches from the Forbes 400 list. Not disappointed.
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near extinction
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Green Envy got out into wide circulation and look where we are now.
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Egyptians mummified everything. Beetles, snakes, birds, cats, crocodiles. People frequently came across caches of literal tons of animal mummies, and after digging through them to find anything of actual value, you’d notice the stains you’d acquire from handling them. Shiploads of mummies were sent off to be ground up for paint and fertilizer- gotta get something out of all that dissapointed effort, and a dependable pigment is a dependable pigment. Other old time pigments used urine and various kinds of animal dung already so it wasn’t much of a stretch.
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Ahhhh…ummmm…there’s a market for quality old artists’ supplies that were cached away for a long time: Pigments, brushes, antique paper and canvas, the inks that were once used to print stock certificates…
I heard this from a friend.
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The prequel to this book, which was mostly an autobiography and a little bit of a ‘how-to’, is a great story and fascinating read. For me, his description of how he successfully forged a renaissance master’s sketch with the tine of period silver fork had me laughing out loud. The upshot of the book is that a forgery doesn’t have to perfect to be successful, it just has to be good enough that greedy dealers won’t risk looking the gift horse in the mouth.
The Forbes collection is for the skeptical buyers who are bringing the horse in for dental X-rays.
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It was probably a side product from Big Medieval Pharmacopia; Mummy was used as a medicine too.
“Take two scruples of Late Kingdom Royalty and call be back on Monday if it doesn’t get any better.”
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But do they have “Flesh”?
or
But do they have “Smell the Glove” black? (none more black)
or
Just ignore me, I’ll go away.
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