Blue hour

The minutes after sunset and before sunrise when the sky holds deep, even blue. Melancholy's light, and the city's best backdrop.

Blue hour is golden hour's introverted sibling: the sun below the horizon, the sky a luminous cobalt ceiling, and every practical light, windows, signs, street lamps, suddenly warm by contrast. It is the brief daily hour when the world grades itself into cold-against-warm.

The window is shorter than golden hour and less forgiving, light levels fall by the minute, but what it gives cannot be lit: an even, sourceless blue that swallows shadows and makes cities glow. Our palette, ink-blue ground with gold events, is blue hour made permanent; the reference sky was always this one.