Painting crystals

Crystal dyeing is a form of water painting as well as a method of engineering ‘oriented gases’ of functional chromophores. Here, we provide a brief overview of the subject of dyeing crystals from the first crystal dyer in the middle of the nineteenth century through our work of the past decade. This highlight is illustrated by hand and the crystals are rendered with water colour, the preferred method of colour scientific illustration at the time when the subject of dyeing crystals first took shape. In so doing, we choose a self-referential representation that is most faithful to the objects themselves, and which underscores the roots of the subject.