Dancheong colors used for Korean cultural heritage architecture restoration

Dancheong is Korean traditional decorative coloring on special wooden buildings, and it has been preserved by Danjeongjang as a national intangible cultural heritage—a craftman with a special skill to paint dancheong. All dancheong in the national heritage have been managed by the Cultural Heritage Administration following the standard procedure. However, there is no available information about final colors. In this study, a total of six different dancheong color paletts were prepared by six different apprentices of the living national treasures. In total, there were 20 different colors and 12 colors were shown in all six palettes. The color measurement result showed that well trained dancheong painter can reproduce the same colors repeatedly with fairly high precision with 1.8 ΔEab * on average except two colors—Ju-hong and Yang-cheong—showing high chroma differences, but with very similar lightness and hue angle indicating that hue of dancheong colors is the most important factor to judge the correctness of the color preproduction. The dancheong colors show large variations depending on the painters but the painters trained by the same teacher have the similar color palettes. Further in-depth dancheong color investigation is needed to fully understand the contemporary dancheong colors.