 Fantasy: September 18, 2024 Issue [#12749] |
This week: Colorful Language Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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Life is a painting, and you are the artist. You have on your palette all the colors in the spectrum - the same ones available to Michaelangelo and DaVinci.
—Paul J. Meyer
It's basically the story of my life. Trying to paint the prettiest picture I can with the colors I have.
—Caleb Plant
The colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.
—Edvard Munch
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Color (or colour for those not from the US): We tend to take it for granted. With billions of combinations of shades, hues, tints, and saturations to choose from, it's a wonder we don't all get decision paralysis whenever it's time to paint a thing. Personally, I can only bypass the decision paralysis by getting everything in black. Even then, though, I'm really just getting a particularly dark shade of gray (that's grey for those not from the US).
It wasn't always like that. Not too long ago, you couldn't just walk into the nearest home "improvement" store with a paint chip, demanding—successfully—a precise match. That this is possible now would have been in the realm of fantasy even a century ago. It's science and technology, advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic.
In the still-more-distant past, pigments could be extraordinarily valuable, with trade in them making or breaking kingdoms and empires, much as with precious metals or spices. Perhaps the oldest known pigment was ocher (or ochre...), a kind of mineral soil which, depending on its composition, could range in the brown-orange-red section of the color wheel, maybe even verging on yellow.
But that still leaves the greens, blues, and purples, the latter of which are arguably not even on the spectrum.
Apparently, you can't just grind up green leaves for green; it quickly becomes a way less interesting shade of brown than ocher creates. I saw an article recently that discussed a particular blue pigment that somehow connected western Europe and eastern Asia. And as I'm sure everyone's aware, purple was such a rare and expensive dye (made from sea snails) that, in some European countries, only royalty could rock it; this was because it could only be sourced from Phoenicia—you know, the same place that gave us alphabets for free.
Point is, for most of human history, not all colors were created equal.
And that's not even getting into the differences between light source color and pigment color, or how different cultures chop up the spectrum in different ways—for example, what we call orange is, for some, just another shade of red. It gets really complicated really fast, but I will note that our division of the continuous spectrum of light into seven distinct bands is the result of Newton, who bridged alchemy and science, requiring that color fit neatly into the same mystical context as the heavenly bodies and days of the week.
One of the first fantasy stories I read, though I don't remember the name of it or the author, and it may have been science fiction but it doesn't matter, talked about being able to see new colors not on the spectrum. That engaged my curiosity for a very long time, perhaps even through right now: how? How can there be colors we haven't seen? Sure, you can make orange, for example, brighter, like with safety vests or those cones you see on the highway, but it's still, basically, orange. Even if we could expand our vision, somehow, to incorporate higher and lower wavelengths (what we call ultraviolet and infrared), what could those new colors possibly look like? And how could we even describe them, considering the koan-like difficulty of trying to describe color to a person who has been sightless from birth.
Not to mention that we have no way of knowing if we see the same colors as other people. Like, I might see something and call it blue, and you might agree that it's blue, but if I could somehow see through your eyes and with your brain, I might see orange.
We can expand our vision, using technology, but to interpret them, those wavelengths still need to be mapped onto the familiar spectrum somehow. This is how we get all those gorgeous cosmoscapes from Hubble or JWST, both of which detect light that, to our eyes, is invisible.
But I suppose that's one reason we write fantasy: to express the inexpressible. |
Planning on doing NaNoWriMo this year? Or maybe going it alone on your next story? Either way, Prep can help!
And some Fantasy, colorful or otherwise:
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Last time, in "The Game is a Fruit" , I talked about fruits (and maybe some vegetables).
oldgreywolf on wheels  : In a tomato fight, slice the tomato almost from the stem to almost the bottom, six or eight times around the circumference, before throwing, thus increasing the splatter factor.
That's entirely too much work, and also, people will see you have a knife and might escalate the weaponry. But it is important to have an extremely sharp knife if you're slicing tomatoes.
Magnolia : Enjoyed your article and all the facts.
My favorite: To a comedian, they’re missiles.
Gave me the first laugh of my morning. Thank you.
Thank you! It's very difficult for me to write anything without at least one attempt at humor (that's humour for those not from the US...)
That's it for me for September! See you next month. Until then,
DREAM ON!!!
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