AYANAMIBLUE

What started as a desire to make a phone wallpaper turned into short, confusing dive into the world of Japanese paint catalogs…

JP-based company Turner Colour Works Ltd. at some point in 2015 officially partnered with Khara and licensed a color based on the character Ayanami Rei from Evangelion fame.

AYANAMIBLUE, an Acrylic Gouache paint, made for the Evangelion 20th Anniversary, is a bit of a unicorn. Not only is it an exclusively licensed paint, but it also doesn’t appear in any digital form. It is decidedly a physical product; an analog medium. So trying to ascertain what exact rendition of digital blue AYANAMIBLUE could be, is a bit like trying to compare a laptop photo of a fire side-by-side with an actual fire in front of you made from a bundle of sticks.

Incidentally, the promotional images, all alleging to be from Turner’s official marketing material, feature a completely different pastel-adjacent blue per image. Not even the official PDF of Turner’s catalog features a consistent color, and according to very inconsistently written and translated articles which features promotional material obtained from a Twitter post that links to images from a now-defunct Japanese Amazon reseller page, the color is allegedly somewhere between Frost Blue and Water Blue, assumed to be two separate colors from Turner’s catalog of colors.

But it’s actually a bit more involved than that, because those two shades of blue (Frost and Water) don’t exist. Or at least, Turner Color Works does not currently currently offer them in their current lineup of colors.

Despite it being associated with possibly the most notoriously brand-aware franchise of all time, there’s not much information to be gleaned from the English webpage. The paint is meant to be a niche product, for figurine painting, presumably Evangelion-related figurines.

Coming from the Western world where virtually every color under the rainbow is discernable by a Copic marker/color-chip code with accompanying digital color hexcode (8-bit color RGB values written in hexadecimal form), AYANAMIBLUE is shrouded in mystery.

Gated by a language barrier, the official JP site for Turner Colour Works displays a wholly separate promotional page. Here we see AYANAMIBLUE coded with Turner’s internal color-chip code number[901], and that it is also actually sold as part of a set, and using Google’s translated webpages, we can see why some inconsistencies may exist.

There are actually 4 separate AYANAMIBLUE paints;

• AYANAMIBULE [901]-A

(that’s not a typo, that’s what the official page says)

• -PEARL [902]
• -Gel Medium [903]
• JCOLOUR

A matte goache acrylic paint, a pearlescent acrylic paint, a colormatched gel paint thickener, and a “Human-friendly water-based interior paint” that is allegedly mixed made to order.

Listen, I just wanted to make a cool personalized phone wallpaper using the exact color. A quick Google search shows that someone just quickly sampled one of the colors from the promo materials that got so incredibly compressed after being reshared three times over that it actually doesn’t match the official JP promotional site. And the Turner Color Works catalog PDF actually uses a CMYK color blend because it’s scanned from the actual physical catalog, so it’s utterly useless.

Thankfully, there’s a saving grace. The official order page has a color-chip that isn’t a scan, and doesn’t match any other shown blue in the marketing materials.

It’s a square on a webpage with an exact digital color of the [901] paint.

AYANAMIBLUE

#8CB7E4

rgb(140,183,228)

If you Google it and find anything else, it’s wrong… time to adjust your fanart.