I can’t get my head around how color is made for paints. In my mind you extract the pigment of something naturally occurring but that can’t be it because what constitutes blue or red must be a different material all together.
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Traditionally paints are indeed made from natural elements, e.g. lapis lazuli for blue. This is often quite expensive, and cheaper modern paints rely on chemistry to obtain their colors. They make a molecule knowing it will be red or blue or green. The color of a material is a matter of physics and chemistry, and how they absorb or reflect the light.
Maybe you have heard about white light being a mix of all colors. An object appearing green under a white light absorbs all the colors except green, which is reflected.
Pigments are really fascinating.
Pigments did indeed start out being extracted from natural sources, and as you point out that means different paints are using completely different materials and therefore behave differently. Some paints are more or less transparent. Some paints fade quickly. Some paints even change color over time. This all depends on the pigment.
Pigment sources can vary wildly. For example, umber, ochre, and sienna in both their raw and “burnt” variations are all earth pigments. They’re literally types of dirt that have a nice sort of brownish color useful for paints. Ochre is another earth pigment made from dirt, but can be yellow or reddish, or even purple. These are probably the oldest forms of pigments we have found, they’re usually what is used in cave paintings for example.
Another very old form of pigment is carbon black. This is sometimes called lamp black or vine black, but essentially all carbon blacks are formed by burning some kind of material and collecting the soot or charcoal that remains.
Chalk can make a nice white color.
As history went along, we found all sorts of other types of pigments. Others have mentioned lapis lazuli, which is ground up gemstones and hugely expensive but made a very brilliant blue color called ultramarine. There was also vermilion, a red color made by grinding cinnabar minerals. Lead white became a common pigment around the same time.
Really, there are too many pigments to list them all here. This is a website about pigments that I find very interesting, if you want to know about other colors: [http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/](http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/)
Oh, one more I find fascinating. Mummy brown, made by literally grinding up Egyptian mummies. Very popular for quite a while, though some artists apparently were appalled when they found out what they had called “Egyptian brown” was actually made of.
Modern pigments are interesting as well, since we’ve discovered new ways to synthesize chemicals that never occur naturally, or are so rare that they were never used as pigments before. I just don’t know as much about them.
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