"Cousin Ricky" <rickysttATyahooDOTcom> wrote:

> I don't know what "steel blue" even means.
Steel can be protected by creating a protective layer of black iron oxide on the
surface in a process called "blueing".  It can range from a shiny black to an
amazing "milky" blue in some of the old Smith & Wesson revolvers.

When steel gets heated, it can discolor, and cause a rainbow effect - which is
used to gauge tempering to a certain hardness before quenching.

Perhaps it's hard to see, or perhaps it's the power of suggestion, but the
1-foot blade of my knife (stainless) although "silver" has a very very faint
blue to it - it could be an effect of the rippling of the metal, the polishing,
oils on the surface giving some sort of iridescence, or some actual blue
component to the reflected light.

It's an interesting project that you've started to bite off there.
I seem to recall that "way" back, some person or persons compiled a sort of
color name library or libraries so that you could look up just about anything by
name and there would be an RGB value for it.

As others have pointed out, some colors are derived from the things they impart
their color to.  Oranges, salmon, walnut, carmine, etc.  I suppose that there
might be an adequate number of images on could search to average a result,
though I can only imagine that there would be issues with lighting and angle and
radiosity and exposure and....
I guess the easiest things to experiment with would be pure chemicals that are
the exact shade of the color.   Carmine, mauve, fuchsia, orpiment, ....
Art stores usually have oil paints based on these exact pigments, which is
amazing given that they're based on lead, chromium, mercury, cadmium, etc.

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