The Ultimate Guide to Colour & Symbolism in Skateboard Art in 2026

June 30, 2026

The ultimate guide to colour and symbolism in skateboard art 2026 DeckArts Berlin ultramarine lapis lazuli Prussian blue Hokusai gold Byzantine Klimt red cochineal green arsenic white black earth tones ochre Japanese pigments complementary colours

Last updated: May 2026 · By Stanislav Arnautov · Berlin · 28 min read

Colour in art is never just decoration — each pigment has a history, a cost, and a meaning. This guide decodes the great colours of art: why Vermeer’s blue was worth more than gold, how a brand-new blue made Hokusai’s wave possible, what Klimt’s gold signified, and what red, green, and white have meant across traditions — so you can read a masterwork deck, not just look at it. Design your own deck or explore below.

We tend to think of colour as the simplest part of a painting — but it is one of the richest. For most of history, colours were rare, costly, and hard-won substances dug from the earth, ground from stones, or brewed through dangerous chemistry, and each carried associations that the original viewers read instantly. A blue robe meant one thing, a red another; gold meant the sacred. This guide is deliberately different from our decor guides: instead of which wall colour to paint, it decodes the colours within the art itself — the pigments, their history, and their symbolism across European and Japanese traditions — so you understand what you are seeing on a masterwork deck. For practical wall-pairing advice, see our colour & palette guide; for deeper context, the National Gallery and Metropolitan Museum of Art publish superb research on pigments.

Why Colour Carries Meaning

Colour carried meaning because, for most of history, it was scarce and expensive. A pigment was a physical material with a real cost: some came from semi-precious stones, some from rare insects, some from toxic minerals, and the rarest were reserved for the most important things. That economic reality fused with symbolism — a colour that cost a fortune naturally signalled importance, holiness, or wealth — and with cultural association built over centuries. So when you look at colour in an old painting, you are reading a language of cost, rarity, and meaning that the original audience understood at a glance. Learning even a little of it transforms how you see. So colour in art is a language built on the real scarcity and cost of pigments — understanding it lets you read a painting’s meaning, not just admire its surface.

Ultramarine: Bluer Than Gold

The most famous story in the history of colour is ultramarine, the deep, glowing blue made from lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone mined for centuries almost exclusively in the mountains of Afghanistan. Grinding and purifying it into pigment was so laborious, and the stone so rare and far-travelled (its name means “beyond the sea”), that ultramarine became literally more expensive than gold. Because of this cost, Renaissance painters reserved it for the most important figure in a picture — above all the robes of the Virgin Mary, whose blue mantle became a convention precisely because the colour’s preciousness honoured her. Patrons specified in contracts how much ultramarine an artist must use, as a measure of devotion and expense. Vermeer loved it and used it lavishly, even in everyday scenes, which was part of his extravagance. So ultramarine, made from costly lapis, was the most precious colour of all — reserved for the Virgin and the most important figures, a blue that signalled supreme value and reverence.

Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring — her blue turban uses the precious ultramarine Vermeer loved.

Prussian Blue & the Great Wave

If ultramarine is the old, costly blue, Prussian blue is the modern one that changed art — and it has a direct link to one of the most famous images on earth. Prussian blue was the first modern synthetic pigment, created accidentally in Berlin around 1704–06 by a colour-maker and an alchemist, giving the world a deep, stable, affordable blue for the first time. By the early 19th century it had reached Japan through trade, and Katsushika Hokusai seized on this brilliant new imported blue for his series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji — the intense, distinctive blue of The Great Wave off Kanagawa (c. 1831) is Prussian blue. The new pigment’s vividness and affordability were part of what made the series so striking and popular. So Prussian blue, the first modern synthetic pigment, born in Berlin around 1704, travelled to Japan and became the unforgettable blue of Hokusai’s Great Wave — a colour with a truly global story. Our city of Berlin, fittingly, gave this blue its name.

Hokusai’s Great Wave — its iconic blue is Prussian blue, named after Berlin.

Gold: The Sacred Ground

Gold is the colour of the sacred and eternal. In Byzantine mosaics and medieval icons and altarpieces, a flat gold background did not represent a place but a state — the timeless, heavenly, divine realm beyond the ordinary world — and its literal preciousness made it a fitting offering to the holy. Real gold leaf was beaten paper-thin and applied to panels, catching candlelight so the sacred images seemed to glow from within. Centuries later, Gustav Klimt consciously revived this gold-ground tradition in his Golden Phase, but applied that sacred radiance to earthly subjects — love, desire — making them feel transcendent. Gold thus carries a double charge: immense material value and profound spiritual meaning. So gold signifies the sacred, eternal, and supremely precious — the divine ground of icons, revived by Klimt to make human love feel holy, and a colour that glows with meaning.

Klimt’s The Kiss — sacred Byzantine gold, applied to earthly love.

Red: Power, Love & Blood

Red is the most primal and charged colour, and its meanings cluster around life’s intensities: love and passion, power and status, blood and sacrifice, danger and warning. Historically, brilliant reds were hard to make. One of the most prized, carmine or crimson, came from cochineal — tiny insects harvested in their thousands and crushed for their deep red — making fine red costly and a marker of wealth and power (cardinals’ robes, royal cloaks). Vermilion, a brilliant orange-red, came from the toxic mineral cinnabar (mercury sulphide). In painting, red draws the eye instantly and signals the emotionally important: the cloak of a key figure, the flush of life, the heat of passion or martyrdom. So red is the colour of love, power, and blood — historically costly, made from insects and toxic minerals, and used to mark the most vital and important elements of an image.

Green: Nature & the Toxic Hue

Green is the colour of nature, growth, fertility, and renewal — but its history hides a darker thread. A good, stable green was surprisingly hard to achieve for much of art history, and some greens were dangerously toxic. Scheele’s green and Paris green, brilliant 18th–19th-century greens, were based on arsenic, and were used not only in paint but in wallpaper and fabric dye, with real consequences for health. Earlier greens like malachite (from the mineral) and verdigris (from corroded copper) were more benign but could be unstable. Symbolically, green spans the positive (nature, hope, spring, fertility) and, in some contexts, the unsettling (poison, envy, the uncanny). So green is the colour of nature and renewal, but with a toxic history — some of its most brilliant forms were literally poisonous, giving the hue a fascinating double life.

So far we have followed individual colours; the second half of this guide turns to white, black, earth tones, the distinct colour-world of Japanese art, how colours interact, and how to choose a deck by colour.

White & Black

White and black are the two poles of the painter’s range, and both carry deep meaning. White traditionally signifies purity, innocence, light, and the divine — the lily of the Virgin, the wedding dress, the dove — though in some Eastern traditions it is the colour of mourning. For centuries the key white pigment was lead white, prized for its warmth and opacity but highly toxic. Black signifies death, mourning, and the void in the West, but also elegance, formality, and sophistication (the little black dress, the tuxedo). It was made from charred materials — burnt bone (bone black) or soot (lamp black). The Impressionists famously tried to banish black from their shadows, painting them in colour instead, while painters like Manet and Velazquez made black a sumptuous, central colour. So white means purity and light, black means both death and elegance — the two poles of the palette, each made from humble or toxic materials and each rich with meaning.

Earth Tones: The Oldest Colours

The earth tones — the ochres, siennas, and umbers — are the oldest colours in human art, and the most enduring. These warm yellows, oranges, browns, and reddish-browns come from natural clays and earths coloured by iron oxides, dug straight from the ground, and they are the pigments of the very first art: the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira, made tens of thousands of years ago, are painted in ochres and charcoal. Cheap, abundant, stable, and lightfast, earth tones have remained the dependable backbone of painting ever since — the flesh tones, the shadows, the warm grounds of countless masterworks. They connect us directly to the deepest human past. There is also a quiet harmony between these warm, natural earth tones and the warm natural maple of a deck. So the earth tones — ochre, sienna, umber — are humanity’s oldest, most enduring colours, dug from the ground and used since the cave paintings, and they harmonise naturally with the warm maple of a deck.

Botticelli’s Birth of Venus — warm earth-toned flesh and natural colour, at home on warm maple.

Colour in Japanese Art

Japanese ukiyo-e prints developed their own distinct colour world, shaped by available pigments and a different aesthetic. Early prints were hand-coloured or used a limited palette; the full-colour “brocade prints” (nishiki-e) from the 1760s onward layered multiple woodblocks for richer colour. Japanese printmakers used pigments like beni (a delicate pink-red from safflower), indigo blues, and mineral colours, and the arrival of imported Prussian blue in the 19th century transformed the palette, enabling the deep blues of Hokusai and Hiroshige. Crucially, ukiyo-e prized flat areas of unmodulated colour and subtle gradations (bokashi, hand-wiped on the block) rather than European-style blended shading — a flatter, more graphic, more decorative use of colour. So Japanese art has its own colour language — flat, graphic, subtly graded, transformed by imported Prussian blue — distinct from the blended, modelled colour of European oil painting, as our Japanese art guide explores.

How Colours Work Together

Beyond individual meanings, colours gain power from how they are combined — the basis of much of a painting’s visual punch. The key idea is complementary colours: pairs sitting opposite on the colour wheel — blue and orange, red and green, yellow and purple — which, placed side by side, intensify each other and make both appear more vivid. Nineteenth-century colour theory (notably Chevreul) formalised this, and the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists exploited it deliberately: Van Gogh built whole paintings on charged complementary contrasts. Other relationships matter too — analogous colours (neighbours on the wheel) create harmony and calm, while warm (red, orange, yellow) and cool (blue, green, purple) colours advance or recede, creating depth and mood. Vermeer’s famous blue-and-yellow pairing is a complementary harmony. So colours work together through complementary contrast (opposites that intensify) and analogous harmony (neighbours that soothe) — understanding these relationships reveals why a painting’s colour feels vivid or calm.

Choosing a Deck by Colour

Colour knowledge makes choosing a deck richer and more deliberate. You can choose by meaning: a blue-rich piece for calm, depth, or reverence; a gold piece for warmth, luxury, and the sacred; a red-rich piece for passion and energy; an earth-toned piece for grounded, natural warmth. You can choose by mood: cool-toned art (blues, greens) calms and recedes, ideal for restful rooms; warm-toned art (reds, golds, ochres) energises and advances, ideal for focal points. You can choose by harmony with your room, picking art whose dominant colours complement or echo your scheme (see our practical colour & palette guide). And the warm maple itself flatters earth tones, golds, and warm colours especially beautifully. So choose a deck by colour meaning and mood — blue for calm, gold for warmth, red for energy, earth for grounding — and you select a piece that resonates and harmonises, not just one that looks nice.

Questions People Ask

Why was blue the most expensive colour in art?

The finest blue was the most expensive colour because it was made from a rare, far-travelled semi-precious stone. The prized blue, ultramarine, came from lapis lazuli, mined for centuries almost exclusively in the mountains of Afghanistan and transported enormous distances to Europe (its name means “beyond the sea”). Turning the stone into pigment was laborious, requiring extensive grinding and purification, and the raw material was costly to begin with — so the finished ultramarine became literally more expensive than gold. Because of this extraordinary cost, painters reserved it for the most important parts of a picture, above all the robes of the Virgin Mary, and patrons sometimes specified in contracts how much ultramarine an artist had to use, as a measure of devotion and expense. So the rarity, distant origin, and laborious processing of lapis lazuli made its blue the costliest and most prestigious colour in Western art.

What blue did Hokusai use in The Great Wave?

Hokusai used Prussian blue in The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Prussian blue was the first modern synthetic pigment, created accidentally in Berlin around 1704–1706, which gave the world a deep, stable, and affordable blue for the first time. By the early 19th century this pigment had reached Japan through trade, and Hokusai embraced the brilliant new imported blue for his series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (around 1831), of which The Great Wave is the first and most famous print. The intense, distinctive blue that defines the wave and the whole series is this Prussian blue, and its vividness and affordability were part of what made the prints so striking and commercially successful. It is a remarkable global story: a pigment invented in Berlin became the signature colour of the most famous Japanese artwork in the world.

What do different colours symbolise in art?

Colours carry rich, sometimes contradictory symbolism in art, often shaped by the cost and history of their pigments. Blue, especially precious ultramarine, signified the sacred, the heavenly, and the supremely valuable, associated above all with the Virgin Mary. Gold signified the divine, eternal, and precious, used as the sacred ground of icons. Red, costly and vivid, meant love, passion, power, status, blood, and sacrifice. White meant purity, innocence, and light (though mourning in some Eastern cultures). Black meant death and mourning, but also elegance and sophistication. Green meant nature, growth, and renewal, but also, given some toxic green pigments, carried associations of poison or the uncanny. Earth tones (ochres, browns) connect to nature, humility, and the ancient. These meanings varied by culture and era, but understanding the general associations helps you read what a painting’s colours are communicating.

Were some artist paints really poisonous?

Yes — a number of historic pigments were genuinely toxic, sometimes dangerously so. Several brilliant greens, notably Scheele’s green and Paris green (popular in the 18th and 19th centuries), were based on arsenic and were used not only in paints but in wallpapers and fabric dyes, with real health consequences. Lead white, the main white pigment for centuries, was toxic lead. Vermilion, a brilliant orange-red, was made from cinnabar, a mercury compound. Some yellows and others were based on toxic substances like cadmium or chromium. Artists handling these pigments daily faced real risks, and “painter’s colic” (lead poisoning) was an occupational hazard. The desire for brilliant, stable colours often came at a literal cost to health, which is part of the fascinating, sometimes dark history behind the beautiful colours in old paintings. Modern art reproductions, of course, use safe, stable modern pigments and inks.

What are complementary colours?

Complementary colours are pairs of colours that sit directly opposite each other on the colour wheel — the main pairs being blue and orange, red and green, and yellow and purple. Their special property is that when placed side by side, they intensify each other, each making the other appear more vivid and vibrant, creating maximum contrast and visual energy. This effect was formalised in 19th-century colour theory (notably by Chevreul) and was exploited deliberately by the Impressionists and especially Post-Impressionists like Van Gogh, who built paintings around charged complementary contrasts to make them vibrate with energy. By contrast, analogous colours (neighbours on the wheel) create harmony and calm rather than contrast. Understanding complementaries explains why certain colour combinations in art feel so striking and alive — for example, the classic blue-and-orange or red-and-green pairings that recur throughout art history.

How should I choose art by its colours?

You can choose art by colour in three complementary ways: by meaning, by mood, and by harmony with your space. By meaning: pick colours whose associations resonate with you — blue for calm, depth, or reverence; gold for warmth, luxury, and the sacred; red for passion and energy; green for nature; earth tones for grounded, natural warmth. By mood and psychology: cool colours (blues, greens, purples) feel calming and tend to recede, making them well suited to restful rooms like bedrooms, while warm colours (reds, oranges, golds, yellows) feel energising and tend to advance, making them effective focal points for living and working spaces. By harmony with your room: choose art whose dominant colours either echo your existing palette for a cohesive feel, or deliberately contrast with it (using complementary colours) for a striking accent. With skateboard art specifically, remember that the warm natural maple complements earth tones, golds, and warm colours particularly beautifully. Combining these approaches helps you choose a piece that is meaningful, sets the right mood, and fits your space.

About the Author

Stanislav Arnautov is the founder of DeckArts and a creative director from Ukraine based in Berlin. He writes about classical art, interior design, and the craft of turning Grade-A Canadian maple decks into lasting wall art.