Write About the Colour Blue
How do you experience the colour blue? How might one of characters?
A glacial lake, South Island, New Zealand. Photo: Tanya Clarke 2003
So Many Shades of Blue
Just add blue.
Turquoise. Royal. Azure. Cyan. Baby. Pale. Navy. Ultramarine. Tropical. Grey. Dark. Green. Cobalt. Lapis. Peacock. Denim. Sapphire. Powder. Sky. Periwinkle. Prussian. Airforce. Delphinium. Duck Egg. Indigo.
I'm sure you can think of many more.
How do you see the colour blue?
The concept of colour varies from person to person. There will be subtleties of visual experience between us all that might be useful to tap into in your creative writing. You might see a turquoise blue sea while the person standing next to you describes the same water as a bright perfect cyan.
The Belgian photographer Sanne De Wilde, travelled to the island of Pingelap in 2015 to investigate the visual experience of the colour blind inhabitants there, 10% of the population. Her photographs attempt to reflect the way they see and feel about colour.
“The challenge of vision impairment, of course, is that it’s hard to understand something the eye has never seen. What is orange to a person who only knows black and white?
”Color is just a word to those who cannot see it,” De Wilde observed.”...Paradise has a Different Hue by Daniel Stone, National Geographic
We've looked at colour before when writing about the colour yellow. Your mother might think of daffodils nodding their bright flowers in a wild fallow field behind the house where she grew up. You might think of the yellow bananas slowly turning brown and rotting in the fruit bowl in your kitchen.
This week, let's try and write about a different colour; the colour blue. The colour blue has physical effects on our bodies, calming and relaxing, reducing stress and tension.
How do you experience the colour blue? Do you visualise a scene, does a memory spring into your mind? Is there a blue object you keep but you don’t know why? Do you wear any blue clothes? A favourite pair of jeans perhaps.
You can write from the photograph above from the point of view of the people standing there.
How do you think they would describe the blue they're looking at? Try to imagine standing in the same place looking out across the same glacial lake. Where’s the story there? Write it down. Describe it all in glorious colour whatever that is for you.
Until next time.
