With Lisa Fagin Davis' most welcome analysis of different handwriting in the MS, this question came to my mind again. Clearly, the herbal (large-plant) pages were somehow divided among two persons as far as the application of the text goes. But do language A and B (or scribe 1 and 2) pages also display differences in their imagery?
We know that there are different painting styles in the MS. This has been noted about the water, and JKP also wrote about how differences exist in the greens of the plants.
Sam G once noticed that the color red (or at least the brown that passes for red in the VM) is used almost exclusively on A-pages (over 30 instances) with only one clear use on a B-page.
With this in mind, at the end of 2018 I set out to digitally sample all colors used in the large-plant images. You can't trust your eyes for this, since our perception of color is always dependent on context.
I always sampled an area (as large as the image would allow) to avoid deviant pixels. I then noted the HSB values and gradually developed HSB ranges that correspond to particular colors. This was to a degree arbitrary since pigments are not always mixed the same so you get more of a continuum. Still I tried my best to distinguish meaningful differences. I used an online color namer to provide names. I did this in order to avoid bias.
The blue in this section is a mess, often with streaks of different colors going through it. When there was blue, I just sampled the blue and left the other colors alone.
The most difficult to categorize where the different kinds of tan/beige colors. I'm pretty happy with how the greens went.
I ended up with the following color palette:
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The first page distinguishes all those shades; the second page is a reduced version with fewer shades.
I knew from the start that it was a risky undertaking and probably lots of work for nothing. Since I haven't worked on this for a while now and I'm not sure if anything good will come from it, I decided to just share it as-is.