A Cyanometer and a Cloud Colourimeter

It is Spring in the Northern Hemisphere. The lovely blues of the sky inspired me to post a DIY cyanometer as the project for this week.

The cyanometer was invented in 1789 by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, a mountain climber and physicist from Geneva, Switzerland. The image below is from the Biodiversity Library and was published in 1790. I found it in an article from Atlas Obscura.

The following example of a working model is in the collection of Musée d’histoire des sciences de la Ville de Genève) and is included in the short Wikipedia entry Cyanometer.

I designed my cyanometer using pure Cyan. If you want to make one, just print out the pdf and follow the instructions at the bottom of the sheet. It will work best if printed on an inkjet printer, and you may have to play with your ink flow settings to get the full range of tints and shades to print.

If you want to paint your own, a good blue to use would be French Blue, though you may have another blue in your paint box that will work as well. (The sky is not the same blue everywhere since things like air pollution affect the colour.)

A number of artists have been inspired by the cyanometer. This is a painting by Olafur Eliasson, done in 2014 as part of a series of Colour experiments.

Martin Bricelj Baraga installed his first Cyanometer in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, in 2016. It is a permanent installation, raising environmental awareness.

There are now four Cyanometer sculptures in different European cities. They periodically photograph the sky and the images are uploaded to a website. (You can click on the images on the website to get more information about each Cyanometer.)

In 2019 Saskatoon artist Marie Lannoo had an exhibition of works inspired by the blueness of the prairie sky. The Architecture of Colour included works inspired by de Saussure’s cyanometer.

She also gave away cyanometers to visitors to the exhibition.

Even knitters have played with the gradient of de Saussure’s cyanometer.

If you don’t want to print your own, there are commercially available cyanometers. The one below is a cyanotype version.

Since the sky is not always clear, I thought it would be entertaining to do a colorimeter for gauging the tints and shades of clouds. You can download it here if you wish to make one. I used Payne’s Grey for the base colour. Since Payne’s Grey contains black already, I moved the full hue to number 17. (The full hue of cyan on my cyanometer is at 11.)

If you are painting your own Cloud Colourimeter, an alternate paint choice might be Copen Blue.

Here’s a picture of my Cloud Colorimeter in use. (I was working without my glasses as they make the screen on my camera invisible. I didn’t see the nicely framed fish windsock in the picture until I put it up on my computer screen!)

As an added bonus, I created a monochrome gray scale version as well. You can download the file from this page.

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In book arts news:

In keeping with the rather blue theme of today’s post, you might take a look at Blue-Sky Thinking: “The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight” (1877).

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My book, The Book-Makers, (which is a book about books — published in book-form) is out in America in 11 days. The cover is different (more 16th-century), and the word ‘Remarkable’ has been pruned from the UK subtitle (‘A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives’) — but the rest is the same! In anticipatory celebration, I’d thought I’d ping out a section from the final chapter: chapter 11, on ‘Zines, Do-It-Yourself, Boxes, Artists’ Books’, which brings book-making up to an anarchic contemporary. Part of this chapter is about Laura Grace Ford’s brilliant Savage Messiah, which I really enjoyed reading and thinking about. So here is a slice of that: I hope you enjoy it!

You can find Smyth’s excerpt on Substack.

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In other news:

I continue to play with kites. My single-cell box has still not been flown successfully. The weather has not been suitable. In the meantime, I have been building a small kite inspired by Indonesian kites.

Here’s my completed kite frame.

Perhaps I will be able to show you another finished kite in flight next week.