Pastel blue thread on a graffiti

Image of violence - girl carrying in two arms a bomb ...

Although a little bit derisory, this blue thread by its alive and kicking blue, comes to blur the "message" of this graf ' of girl carrying the war.

A pastel blue against blacks ideas a little bit nightmarish.

And in counterpoint, below, another style of blue, a natural blue of evening sky, totally foreign to the sad walls of our cities. And the unsettled question, in the passage: the contemplative peace of the campaign and the nature is better, or the environment rich in ideas and in invention of the City ?

... The opportunity to speak about the blue and about the pastel !

This graffiti in the stencil will be a part, afterward, of the series of graf' wall

What we said in 1690 in the dictionary of Furetière :

BLUE. Which is of color of azure. The blue of the Dry cleaners is a color which is made with the woad, which grows at the top Languedoc; either with the vuede or the small woad which grows in Normandy; or with some indigo which comes from India. The nuances of the blue are the white blue, the rising blue, the pale blue, the dying blue, the cute blue, the celestial blue, it holds the middle of the nuance; blue queen; dark blue, it is a well darkened blue; Roy's blue, flower of guesde, blue pers, Aldego, and blue of hell. Of the blue and the yellow consists the green. Of the blue and the red of scarlet of France is made Roy's color, amaranth, the color of thought, the purple. Of the blue and the carmine red consists the coil, the purple, the linen grey, and other grey, As they are more or less boiled. The beautiful pale or blue blues will be dyed by pure tank of India. The celestial or complete blues have to be one foot of orseille of Lyon, then have passed on a tank of India. It is a condition necessary for the light to seem blue, to be intermittent: such is the one of the flame of suffer, of the spirit of wine, some rotten wood, glow-worms, scales of some fishes, and .les Juices of blue flowers and violets become green by alkalis, and take a beautiful red by acids.It countered with the blue in the water where we put dipping some nephritic wood. The blue of the Dry cleaners does not receive change by acids, nor by alkalis: that is why we use pastel before to give another color, when we want to give the good complexion to some material.
It is the very-big estrangement which persuades us that heavens are blue, a very remote sea countered blue. This word comes from the German blue, a Latin origin, and believes that we said blutum, quasi ablutum aut dilutum, because it is a sort of color of purple washed well: where from comes as well as we call these blue flowers which come in small villages, blaveoli.

In Painting we say that the blue is the most elusive color the sky and the distant of which we paint.
We say figuratively, that a man becomes quite blue, when he arises him(her) some violent pain in the soul, as when we bring him some annoying piece of news, that one him, made some criticism of whom he Feels guilty, because then he becomes indeed pale.
We call a Cordon bleu, a Knight of the order of Saint Esprit, because the mark of this Order is a cross attached to a blue tie.


PASTEL. Dough made by several colors erased and crushed together, or separately, any sorts of pencils of which we make to paint on the paper, or the parchment. There are Painters who manage magnificently to paint portraits in pastel.

Woad, is a grass which comes from a seed which we sow at the beginning of the spring, and four harvests a year, and sometimes five or six of which we make. It is of a big use in the dyes to prepare materials to receive all other colors, and to increase the sheen by it and the duration. It gives them at first the blue dye. II grows there in Languedoc a lot. The woad has the leaf almost similar to the plantain.The best has the plain leaf and without hair; and the bad has the hairy sheet(leaf), which we call an illegitimate child. The small woad is the one of fourth or fifth harvested. The woad of the last harvest is called marouchin. The oldest woad is the best. We some time let wither its leaf, then we put it under the wheel to crush it ; after one by way of bread rolls, that we call cocks, or cocaignes, that we air in the shade on sieves, until we want it to put powder; what we make with wooden masses. We let it soak during four months into some very stagnant water, where we move it approximately forty times, and then it is fit to be packed and used. We let it soak during four months into some very stagnant water, where we move him(it) approximately forty times, and thenit is fit to be packed and used. Several confuse it with the pastel of India, or the indigo, which is good of various value and virtue. A strong color of pastel is almost black, and is the base of so many sorts of colors, that the Dry cleaners have a certain scale or count of floors with which they count the brightness and the depth of this color. The indigo is the same nature that the pastel, with this difference, that this one is all the substance of the grass; instead of the indigo is there only the juice, or the floury dregs dried in the sun, which we train in tablets or in balls.

There is a wildwoad leaves of which make bigger that those of the cultivated pastel, and are similar to those of the lettuce.Its stalks are two cubits of top, more hail, more delicate and more branchy, besides that they fire a little at the red. In their top there are several bladders as small tongues which contain its seed. Its flowers are small.

Quotations extracted from the work of 1942 émile Perrot's healing plants
WOAD - Isatis tinctoria L. Crucifers. - the Pastel is spread in fields, in uncultivated places, on hillsides, banks of Central and Southern Europe. It was widely cultivated at about XIIth century for the blue colouring similar to the indigo, which we prepared with its leaves and which results from the halving of a heteroside, the indican. Replaced by synthetic products, the Woad is sometimes cultivated as forage plant.

Vulgar names :

• Guède, Vuède, Pastel (français)
• Fàrber-Wait (Deutsch)
• Woad (English)
• Pastello, Vado (Italiano)
• Hierba pastel (Español)

Read also in the French version a more complete article on the culture of the Woad,
with an engraving of the plant, resulting from the Dictionary of Natural history of Gérin - on 1833