Pleasant Tent Sky

From the French plaisant, pleasing — used as a color modifier since the fifteenth century for hues that read as agreeable, the kind of color that wears well over a long viewing without becoming demanding or fatiguing. Pleasant green, pleasant rose: moderate saturation combined with optical comfort. Sits at the crisp-bucket alongside easy and calm.

Old French tente, stretched-cloth. As a color modifier, tent implies a stretched-canvas-shelter quality, the visual register of Bedouin-and-Mongolian nomadic-and-encampment stretched-canvas-and-felt-and-rope tent-and-yurt surfaces under desert-and-steppe nomadic-encampment open-sky light. Sits at the modifier-and-place end of the grid, parallel to hut and bivouac in usage.

The blue of a clear sky at noon — produced by Rayleigh scattering, the preferential dispersion of shorter wavelengths through atmospheric molecules. Air itself is colorless; the color we see is sunlight scattered toward our eyes by every cubic kilometer above. The reference shade is mid-latitude noon under a high pressure system: a clean, slightly green-shifted blue with the luminous depth of light scattered across an entire hemisphere of air.