Complete study of traditional thai colors used in mural paintings: Traditional thai color name dictionary

Abstract

AbstractThe major obstacle in identifying traditional Thai colors used in mural paintings is that most exist today only as names in old textbooks. The textbooks mention the name of each color without giving quantitative information about it. Mural paintings in Thailand have never been restored by matching the original colors, and, therefore, it is impossible to gather colorimetric data from any mural painting. Only few artists posses today the knowledge, inherited from their elders, to produce traditional Thai color names from natural pigments. However, there is no general accepted recipe among artists to produce any of these colors by means of pigment proportions and dilutions. For this reason, there is no other way to identify traditional Thai color names except for studying the color characteristics of samples painted by artists who still know how the colors look. Thai mural painting colors will be one of Thai's lost cultural treasures once these artists disappear. Therefore, the identification and quantitative description of these colors became a high priority. In this article, we review the method used in our research for identifying more than half of the studied traditional Thai mural painting colors and describe an improved method for identifying the rest of the colors. We show calculation processes used in the software that we created as part of the improved method. We also suggest a way for restoring the mural paintings, using the identified color names, given the fact that the latest restorations totally destroyed the old paintings in Lampang province. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 39, 616–629, 2014