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= Gray =
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Introduction
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Grey (more frequent in British English) or gray (more frequent in
American English) is an intermediate color between black and white. It
is a neutral or achromatic color, meaning that it has no chroma. It is
the color of a cloud-covered sky, of ash, and of lead.
The first recorded use of 'grey' as a color name in the English
language was in 700 CE. 'Grey' is the dominant spelling in European
and Commonwealth English, while 'gray' is more common in American
English; however, both spellings are valid in both varieties of
English.
In Europe and North America, surveys show that gray is the color most
commonly associated with neutrality, conformity, boredom, uncertainty,
old age, indifference, and modesty. Only one percent of respondents
chose it as their favorite color.
Etymology
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'Grey' comes from the Middle English or , from the Old English , and
is related to the Dutch and German . There are no certain cognates
outside Germanic languages; terms such as Spanish , Italian and
Medieval Latin 'griseus' are considered Germanic loanwords. The first
recorded use of 'grey' as a color name in the English language was in
700 AD.
The distinction between 'grey' and 'gray' spellings in usual
Commonwealth and American English respectively developed the 20th
century.
Antiquity through the Middle Ages
===================================
In antiquity and the Middle Ages, grey was the color of undyed wool,
and thus was the color most commonly worn by peasants and the poor. It
was also the color worn by Cistercian monks and friars of the
Franciscan and Capuchin orders as a symbol of their vows of humility
and poverty. Franciscan friars in England and Scotland were commonly
known as the grey friars, and that name is now attached to many places
in Great Britain.
Renaissance and the Baroque
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During the Renaissance and the Baroque, grey began to play an
important role in fashion and art. Black became the most popular color
of the nobility, particularly in Italy, France, and Spain, and grey
and white were harmonious with it.
Grey was also frequently used for the drawing of oil paintings, a
technique called 'grisaille'. The painting would first be composed in
grey and white, and then the colors, made with thin transparent
glazes, would be added on top. The grisaille beneath would provide the
shading, visible through the layers of color. Sometimes, the grisaille
was simply left uncovered, giving the appearance of carved stone.
Grey was a particularly good background color for gold and for skin
tones. It became the most common background for the portraits of
Rembrandt van Rijn and for many of the paintings of El Greco, who used
it to highlight the faces and costumes of the central figures. The
palette of Rembrandt was composed almost entirely of somber colors. He
composed his warm greys out of black pigments made from charcoal or
burnt animal bones, mixed with lead white or a white made of lime,
which he warmed with a little red lake color from cochineal or madder.
In one painting, the portrait of Margaretha de Geer (1661), one part
of a grey wall in the background is painted with a layer of dark brown
over a layer of orange, red, and yellow earths, mixed with ivory black
and some lead white. Over this he put an additional layer of glaze
made of mixture of blue smalt, red ochre, and yellow lake. Using these
ingredients and many others, he made greys which had, according to art
historian Philip Ball, "an incredible subtlety of pigmentation". The
warm, dark and rich greys and browns served to emphasize the golden
light on the faces in the paintings.
Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
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Grey became a highly fashionable color in the 18th century, both for
women's dresses and for men's waistcoats and coats. It looked
particularly luminous coloring the silk and satin fabrics worn by the
nobility and wealthy.
Women's fashion in the 19th century was dominated by Paris, while
men's fashion was set by London. The grey business suit appeared in
the mid-19th century in London; light grey in summer, dark grey in
winter; replacing the more colorful palette of men's clothing early in
the century.
The clothing of women working in the factories and workshops of Paris
in the 19th century was usually grey. This gave them the name of
'grisettes'. "'Gris'" or grey also meant drunk, and the name
"'grisette'" was also given to the lower class of Parisian
prostitutes.
Grey also became a common color for military uniforms; in an age of
rifles with longer range, soldiers in grey were less visible as
targets than those in blue or red. Grey was the color of the uniforms
of the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, and of the
Prussian Army for active service wear from 1910 onwards.
Several artists of the mid-19th century used tones of grey to create
memorable paintings; Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot used tones of
green-grey and blue grey to give harmony to his landscapes, and James
McNeill Whistler created a special grey for the background of the
portrait of his mother, and for his own self-portrait.
Whistler's arrangement of tones of grey had an effect on the world of
music, on the French composer Claude Debussy. In 1894, Debussy wrote
to violinist Eugène Ysaÿe describing his 'Nocturnes' as "an experiment
in the combinations that can be obtained from one color - what a study
in grey would be in painting".
Twentieth and twenty-first centuries
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In the late 1930s, grey became a symbol of industrialization and war.
It was the dominant color of Pablo Picasso's celebrated painting about
the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, 'Guernica'.
After the war, the grey business suit became a metaphor for uniformity
of thought, popularized in such books as 'The Man in the Gray Flannel
Suit' (1955), which became a successful film in 1956.
Storm clouds
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The whiteness or darkness of clouds is a function of their depth.
Small, fluffy white clouds in summer look white because the sunlight
is being scattered by the tiny water droplets they contain, and that
white light comes to the viewer's eye. However, as clouds become
larger and thicker, the white light cannot penetrate through the
cloud, and is reflected off the top. Clouds look darkest grey during
thunderstorms, when they can be as much as 20,000 to 30,000 feet high.
Stratiform clouds are a layer of clouds that covers the entire sky,
and which have a depth of between a few hundred to a few thousand feet
thick. The thicker the clouds, the darker they appear from below,
because little of the sunlight is able to pass through. From above, in
an airplane, the same clouds look perfectly white, but from the ground
the sky looks gloomy and grey.
The greying of hair
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The colour of a person's hair is created by the pigment melanin, found
in the core of each hair. Melanin is also responsible for the color of
the skin and of the eyes. There are only two types of pigment: dark
(eumelanin) or light (phaeomelanin). Combined in various combinations,
these pigments create all natural hair colours.
Melanin itself is the product of a specialised cell, the melanocyte,
which is found in each hair follicle, from which the hair grows. As
hair grows, the melanocyte injects melanin into the hair cells, which
contain the protein keratin and which makes up our hair, skin, and
nails. As long as the melanocytes continue injecting melanin into the
hair cells, the hair retains its original colour. At a certain age,
however, which varies from person to person, the amount of melanin
injected is reduced and eventually stops. The hair, without pigment,
turns grey and eventually white. The reason for this decline of
production of melanocytes is uncertain. In the February 2005 issue of
'Science', a team of Harvard scientists suggested that the cause was
the failure of the melanocyte stem cells to maintain the production of
the essential pigments, due to age or genetic factors, after a certain
period of time. For some people, the breakdown comes in their
twenties; for others, many years later. According to the site of the
magazine 'Scientific American', "Generally speaking, among Caucasians
50 percent are 50 percent grey by age 50." Adult male gorillas also
develop silver hair, but only on their backs - see Physical
characteristics of gorillas.
Optics
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Over the centuries, artists have traditionally created grey by mixing
black and white in various proportions. They added a little red to
make a warmer grey, or a little blue for a cooler grey. Artists could
also make a grey by mixing two complementary colours, such as orange
and azure.
Today the grey on televisions, computer displays, and telephones is
usually created using the RGB colour model. Red, green, and blue light
combined at full intensity on the black screen makes white; by
lowering the intensity, it is possible to create all the different
shades of grey.
In printing, grey is usually obtained with the CMYK colour model. By
using black ink at a lower density than the one needed to print black,
all the shades of grey can be created. Grey can also be formed by
mixing cyan, magenta, and yellow in a specific proportion, each at a
low or moderate density. Usually, both methods are combined.
Most greys have a cool or a warm cast to them, as the human eye can
detect even a minute amount of colour saturation. Adding a small
amount of yellow, orange, or red will create a "warm grey". Adding a
small amount of green, cyan, blue, or violet will form a "cool grey".
When no colour is added, the colour is "neutral grey", "achromatic
grey", or simply "grey". Images consisting wholly of black, white and
greys are called monochrome, black-and-white, or greyscale.
right
|colspan=2|310px
||**Warm grey**
||**Cool grey**
Mixed with yellow Mixed with blue
; RGB model
: Grey values result when 'R' = 'G' = 'B', for the colour ('R, G, B')
(0 < R, G, B < 1).
:
;CMYK model
: Grey values are produced by 'C = M = Y' = 0; 0 < K < 1, for
the colour ('C, M, Y, K'). Lightness is adjusted by varying 'K.' In
theory, any mixture where 'C = M = Y' is neutral, but in practice such
mixtures are often a muddy brown.
:
;HSL and HSV models:Achromatic greys have no saturation, so grey is
produced by S = 0; 0 < (L or V) < 1; (hue (H) is undefined), for
the colour (H, S, L) or (H, S, V).
{
!HTML Colour Name !Sample ! !Hex triplet
(rendered by name) (rendered by hex triplet)
gainsboro #DCDCDC
lightgray #D3D3D3
silver #C0C0C0
darkgray #A9A9A9
gray #808080
dimgray #696969
| #77**8899**
lightslategray
| #70**8090**
slategray
| #2F**4F4F**
darkslategray
|}
Web colors
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There are several tones of grey available for use with HTML and
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as named colors, while 254 true greys are
available by specification of a hex triplet for the RGB value. All are
spelled 'gray', using the spelling 'grey' can cause errors. This
spelling was inherited from the X11 color list. Internet Explorer's
Trident browser engine does not recognize 'grey' and renders it green.
Another anomaly is that 'gray' is in fact much darker than the X11
color marked 'darkgray'; this is because of a conflict with the
original HTML gray and the X11 gray, which is closer to HTML's
'silver'. The three 'slategray' colors are not themselves on the
greyscale, but are slightly saturated toward cyan (green + blue).
Since there are an even (256, including black and white) number of
unsaturated tones of grey, there are two grey tones straddling the
midpoint in the 8-bit greyscale. The color name 'gray' has been
assigned the lighter of the two shades (128, also known as #808080),
due to rounding up.
Pigments
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Until the 19th century, artists traditionally created grey by simply
combining black and white. Rembrandt Van Rijn, for instance, usually
used lead white and either carbon black or ivory black, along with
touches of either blues or reds to cool or warm the grey.
In the early 19th century, a new grey, Payne's grey, appeared on the
market. Payne's grey is a dark blue-grey, a mixture of ultramarine and
black or of ultramarine and sienna. It is named after William Payne, a
British artist who painted watercolours in the late 18th century. The
first recorded use of 'Payne's grey' as a colour name in English was
in 1835.
Animal color
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Grey is a very common color for animals, birds, and fish, ranging in
size from whales to mice. It provides a natural camouflage and allows
them to blend with their surroundings.
Grey matter of the brain
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The substance that composes the brain is sometimes referred to as grey
matter, or "the little grey cells", so the color grey is associated
with things intellectual. However, the living human brain is actually
pink in color; it only turns grey when dead.
Nanotechnology and grey goo
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Grey goo is a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario, also known as
ecophagy: out-of-control self-replicating nanobots consume all living
matter on Earth while building more of themselves.
Grey noise
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In sound engineering, grey noise is random noise subjected to an
equal-loudness contour, such as an inverted A-weighting curve, over a
given range of frequencies, giving the listener the perception that it
is equally loud at all frequencies.
Religion
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In the Christian religion, grey is the color of ashes, and so a
biblical symbol of mourning and repentance, described as sackcloth and
ashes. It can be used during Lent or on special days of fasting and
prayer. As the color of humility and modesty, grey is worn by friars
of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin and Franciscan order as well as
monks of the Cistercian order. Grey cassocks are worn by clergy of the
Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church.
Buddhist monks and priests in Japan and Korea will often wear a
sleeved grey, brown, or black outer robe.
Taoist priests in China also often wear grey.
Politics
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Grey is rarely used as a color by political parties, largely because
of its common association with conformity, boredom and indecision. An
example of a political party using grey as a color are the German Grey
Panthers.
The term "grey power" or "the grey vote" is sometimes used to describe
the influence of older voters as a voting bloc. In the United States,
older people are more likely to vote, and usually vote to protect
certain social benefits, such as Social Security.
'Greys' is a term sometimes used pejoratively by environmentalists in
the green movement to describe those who oppose environmental measures
and supposedly prefer the grey of concrete and cement.
Military
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During the American Civil War, the soldiers of the Confederate Army
wore grey uniforms. At the beginning of the war, the armies of the
North and of the South had very similar uniforms; some Confederate
units wore blue, and some Union units wore grey. There naturally was
confusion, and sometimes soldiers fired by mistake at soldiers of
their own army. On June 6, 1861, the Confederate government issued
regulations standardizing the army uniform and establishing cadet grey
as the uniform color. This was (and still is) the color of the uniform
of cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and
cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, which produced many
officers for the Confederacy.
The new uniforms were designed by Nicola Marschall, a German-American
artist, who also designed the original Confederate flag. He closely
followed the design of contemporary French and Austrian military
uniforms. Grey was not chosen for its camouflage value; this benefit
was not appreciated for several more decades. The South lacked a major
dye industry, though, and grey dyes were inexpensive and easy to
manufacture. While some units had uniforms colored with good-quality
dyes, which were a solid bluish-grey, others had uniforms colored with
vegetable dyes made from sumac or logwood, which quickly faded in
sunshine to the yellowish color of butternut squash.
The German Army wore grey uniforms from 1907 until 1945, during both
the First World War and Second World War. The color chosen was a
grey-green called field grey (). It was chosen because it was less
visible at a distance than the previous German uniforms, which were
Prussian blue. It was one of the first uniform colors to be chosen for
its camouflage value, important in the new age of smokeless powder and
more accurate rifles and machine guns. It gave the Germans a distinct
advantage at the beginning of the First World War, when the French
soldiers were dressed in blue jackets and red trousers. The Finnish
Army also began using grey uniforms on the German model.
Some of the more recent uniforms of the German Army and East German
Army were field grey, as were some uniforms of the Swedish army. The
formal dress (M/83) of the Finnish Army is grey. The Army of Chile
wears field grey today.
The grey suit
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During the 19th century, women's fashions were largely dictated by
Paris, while London set fashions for men. The intent of a business
suit was above all to show seriousness, and to show one's position in
business and society. Over the course of the century, bright colors
disappeared from men's fashion, and were largely replaced by a black
or dark charcoal grey frock coat in winter, and lighter greys in
summer. In the early 20th century, the frock coat was gradually
replaced by the lounge suit, a less formal version of evening dress,
which was also usually black or charcoal grey. In the 1930s the
English suit style was called the drape suit, with wide shoulders and
a nipped waist, usually dark or light grey. After World War II, the
style changed to a slimmer fit called the continental cut, but the
color remained grey.
Sports
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* In baseball, grey is the color typically used for road uniforms.
This came about because in the 19th and early 20th century, away teams
did not normally have access to laundry facilities on the road, thus
stains were not noticeable on the darker grey uniforms as opposed to
the white uniforms worn by the home team.
* The Vegas Golden Knights of the National Hockey League features
steel grey as its primary color and its current alternate uniforms are
steel grey.
* New Caledonia national football teams have worn grey home shirts and
the color is featured on its football badge.
* Georgetown University's basketball teams traditionally wear grey
uniforms at home.
Gay culture
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* In gay slang, a 'grey queen' is a gay person who works for the
financial services industry. This term originates from the fact that
in the 1950s, people who worked in this profession often wore grey
flannel suits.
Associations and symbolism
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In America and Europe, grey is one of the least popular colors; In a
European survey, only one percent of men said it was their favorite
color, and thirteen percent called it their least favorite color; the
response from women was almost the same. According to color historian
Eva Heller, "grey is too weak to be considered masculine, but too
menacing to be considered a feminine color. It is neither warm nor
cold, neither material or spiritual. With grey, nothing seems to be
decided." It also denotes undefinedness and ambiguity, as in a grey
area.
Grey is the color most commonly associated in many cultures with the
elderly and old age, because of the association with grey hair; it
symbolizes the wisdom and dignity that come with experience and age.
The New York Times is sometimes called 'The Grey Lady' because of its
long history and esteemed position in American journalism.
Grey is the color most often associated in Europe and America with
modesty.
See also
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* Shades of grey
* Black
* Black-and-white
* Eigengrau
* List of colors
* Vin gris ('grey wine' in French)
* White
License
=========
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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray
