⚡Day 2. Build your palette.
Considering color.
We start this month’s challenge by looking for inspiration—exploring the world around us in search of surprises, stories, memories, emotions, or opportunities to make connections.
Yesterday, we spent time considering an object. Today, we’re focusing on color.1
PROMPT #2
Color, as any good designer would tell you, conveys powerful emotion and meaning. Color has its own language and symbology and cultural weight. Color can be a shorthand, a warning, an invitation.
And writing about color can be a powerful way into story. For example, in “Geraniums,” Laura Rink’s musing about her grandmother’s love of red geraniums takes her on a journey across continents and thousands of years. “The History of Color,” by Beth Kephart, takes a more impressionistic approach, revisiting flashes of remembered color and moments from across a life.
Consider color.
There are a couple of different ways you might approach this one, depending on your baseline relationship with color.
You can start with a single color—say, blue—and free-associate from that color. What kinds of objects/things do you associate with the color, and then, what kinds of emotions? You may find yourself narrowing down the kind of blue you’re thinking of as “blue,”2 and you may further find the associations on your list becoming more specific and grounded in story. “Blueberries” versus “the tiny, sour, not quite ripe blueberries we found along the path that day when we were hiking up in Michigan that July, when we had just started dating,” say.
Or, you could just start by listing colors–as many as you can, maybe more and more specific in hue, until you hit one you have to say more about.
Share: Your favorite, most colorful sentence.
Did you notice? Two of yesterday’s linked Short Reads pieces also had colors in the title!
Some people might start from a more specific blue.
Turquoise: this sky does not belong to Georgia O'Keeffe, nor the hydrated phosphate of copper and aluminum mined to extinction in the hills of Cerrillos to Tiffany.
(small New Mexico rant this morning)
When my father was displeased, his blue eyes would shed all their warmth and depth and turn hard, like thin, pale ice on a stoop. Winter makes me think of him staring at me.