Beautiful blue skies
Week 47's colours are Blue Sky, Taupe, Spring Green & Grass Green
Join me here on Substack today at 5pm London time for a little creative playtime where I will share a fun sketchbook technique with you.
I’m back in England, we arrived this morning feeling refreshed after a little break in South Africa where we visited family and friends. It’s summer there and to me the skies always seem vast, bigger and bluer than anywhere else I’ve travelled to. Colours for this week’s prompt are from a photograph I took last week which is of a scientifically bluer sky than those of the UK - especially when it’s a cloudy and damp like today!
So what’s the explanation? The sky everywhere appears blue because of something called Rayleigh scattering. Basically sunlight reaches the Earth’s atmosphere as white light and as this light travels through the atmosphere, it collides with gas molecules and tiny particles. All these collisions cause the light to scatter in different directions but shorter wavelengths of light (blue and violet) scatter much more effectively than longer wavelengths (red and orange). Blue light scatters about ten times more than red light, filling the sky with it’s colour in every direction we look.
At sunrise and sunset we see reds, oranges and pinks because the sun is low on the horizon and has to travel through more atmosphere to get to us. By then most the the blue has been scattered away in other directions leaving just the warmer colours.
The skies in South Africa look bigger and bluer as there’s less water vapour and haze in the air. This allows for a purer Rayleigh scattering, producing a deep saturated blue. The sun is also more directly overhead in the region and that means the light passes through less atmosphere to get to our eyes.
Blue Sky Thinking
As a dreamer and a doer I love the term blue sky thinking. It emerged from the world of business in the 1990s and describes creative brainstorming where anything goes, unconstrained by current realities or budgets. It encourages innovative ideas to be presented without worrying about actual feasibility, usually before practical considerations start bringing things back to earth again!
Read more about blue skies here and about blue sky thinking here.
You can also watch renowned American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explain more about the sky’s colours here.
‘‘Blue Summer Skies’, photograph, Esté MacLeod 2025
Colour Combination
The colours this week are Blue Sky, Taupe, Spring Green & Grass Green. Use the colours along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Share this post with someone who likes colour and might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity.
It is fun to see what you create with the prompts, thank you for sharing your creations. If you’re posting on Instagram, please tag #coloricombo and #estemacleod and join us in the private Facebook group Creative Prompts.
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