Colorful Thoughts: Orange!
01 Mar 2012 5 Comments
in Writing Tags: birds, characters, colors, fantasy, orange, writing
This is part of a series. Check out previous posts on purple, blue, yellow, and red!
I’ll be honest with you right up front. I am not a fan of orange.
You don’t see a lot of orange used in fantasy. According to my friend Wikipedia, orange wasn’t a color word in English until people were introduced to the fruit. (The term for the color was a word that basically meant yellow-red.) Really, depending on your point of view and the shade you see, orange can be considered a variant of yellow or a type of red. See? It isn’t even really a color.
Let’s move to nature, shall we? Rust is orange. Iron-bearing rocks can get rusty, making the rocks appear orange. (That’s why Mars is orange, too.) There are orange flowers (again, more of a dark yellow than a real color) and orange fruit. (This is the origin of the word orange.) There isn’t a truly orange gemstone (red-orange or yellow-orange, but not true orange). I will admit there are some cool orange birds (like several of the orioles) and carrots, which I enjoy eating, are orange. Eat too many carrots and you, too, can be orange!
As far as writing goes, orange can mean fire or fire-related beings, although red has that pretty well covered. I mentioned before that it isn’t widely used in fantasy, unless in the form of gold (which is really more yellow, anyway). I have already admitted (and further proven, in this very biased post) that I don’t like orange, so I won’t be changing the orange-less fantasy trend any time soon. Maybe you will?
