The picture on the left is from the /x/ thread; the one on the right you will recognize as the Rider-Waite Wheel of Fortune card, as drawn by Pamela Colman "Pixie" Smith and repeatedly featured on this blog. The only difference is in the color palette. The /x/ version has only four colors: amber (the wheel, serpent, and Four Living Creatures), a darker or more muted amber (Hermanubis), light gray (the sky, the sphinx, and the books), and a darker gray (the clouds).
This obviously corresponds to the four butterfly colors: light and dark amber/orange, and light and dark blue. In fact, I had just been thinking earlier today about how in the traditional eight-color palette of Marseille-style Tarot decks -- which I analyzed several years ago in much greater detail than any normal person would do -- the same underlying color is realized as gray in some historical decks and blue in others -- so I was already primed with the very specific idea of blue and gray being interchangeable on Tarot cards.
In yesterday's post, I also had this very same amber-and-gray palette juxtaposed with the light and dark orange and blue butterflies -- on a card, no less:
2 comments:
Neat table of RGB numbers. How did you decide on the leftmost colours, are they an average? And why include the hex codes?
In light of our recent correspondence, I'm reminded that grey and blue are somewhat interchangeable when it comes to representing emotions. Also, the /x/ card could be seen as gold and silver instead of amber and grey.
The other day I did some poking around on Wiki regarding the butterflies. At first glance I wouldn't have guessed the Morpho and monarch were in the same family. Some other things that stuck out to me:
- Another name for the monarch is the wanderer; its genus is Danaus, that name suggesting "charioteer" in Homeric Greek
- The viceroy mimics the pattern of local Danaus species; in Georgia and the US southwest, that species is the queen (D. gillippus)
- The Morpho peleides (a bit like Pleiades?), or emperor, is patterned rather similarly to the monarch on its dorsal side, but its underside is brown; I was surprised to find several Morpho species are like that, which could relate to the next point
- The Morpho subfamily, Morphinae, also includes owl butterflies, and is related to the Satyrinae subfamily which includes the gatekeeper (Pyronia tithonus)
Yes, the leftmost colors are the average of the various decks in the table. I don't remember why I included hex.
Interesting finds on butterflies, especially the "wanderer" connection.
Peleides is the patronymic of Achilles, son of Peleus. No idea why all these American butterflies have Homeric names.
Post a Comment