Tag: Colors

The Wallpaper

~ Christine Goodnough ~ 20 Comments

Terry was measuring off the first strip of wallpaper when he heard the doorbell. He dashed down the stairs to answer. Glancing through the diamond porthole in the door he saw his friend Gavin standing on the step.

“Hi Gav. Sorry you had to wait but I was upstairs. Come on in.”

“Thanks. Just thought I’d see what you’re up to this morning.” Gavin glanced around. “Sasha not home?”

“Nah. We’re getting the nursery ready, got the wallpaper yesterday, so she went shopping for some accessories. Don’t know why the baby needs accessories, but you know how women are. I said I’d make a start at hanging the wallpaper. You maybe can help me– I’ve never done this before.”

“Oh, I don’t know… How fussy is she?”

“I think it should be easy enough to hang. All balloons. Come on up.” Terry led the way to the nursery.

Gavin looked at the wallpaper strip partly unrolled on the floor. “No kidding, all balloons! Are you sure you’re going to be happy with that when it’s on the wall? It’d make me dizzy.”

“Sasha thinks it’s perfect, so who am I to argue? My job is just to slap it on.”

Gavin eyed the repeating shapes with a frown. “Might be tricky to get it cut right.”

“No sweat. Just have to match these half-balloons at the edges.”

He knelt on the floor and rolled out a second strip next to the first, lined up the balloon and was ready to cut when Gavin said, “Wait a minute!”

Terry looked up. “Problem?”

“If you put those strips together that way every side balloon will be mismatched. See here, this balloon will be half red and half blue. I think the idea is to match the colors, not just the balloons. Blue with blue; red with red. Like this.” He took the roll from Terry and demonstrated.

Terry eyed the two strips. “What a waste of paper! This kiddie design stuff costs big time – and I’m sure Junior won’t care. But yeah. Sasha might not be too happy if they don’t match. Good thing you came along.”

With Gavin’s help Terry got the papering done quickly, then the two of them stood back to survey the overall effect. Gavin winced at the brightness of all those balloons.

Terry shrugged. “Wouldn’t have been my pick. But this is what she wanted and I won’t be spending much time in here. Come on, let’s grab a coffee.”

As soon as Sasha returned from her shopping trip Terry led her upstairs. “The job’s all done, sweetheart. Hope you like it.”

Gavin trailed after them, curious to see her reaction.

Sasha walked into the nursery and looked around. They observed that her face didn’t light up with joy as she studied the wallpaper.

“Something wrong,” Terry asked.

“I…uh.. I guess… I never thought… I mean, it looked great in the sample book but I didn’t get the picture of how a whole room would look with this on all four walls. It’s really pretty, but…uh…”

“A bit overwhelming,” Gavin suggested.

“Yeah. A bit.” Maybe we could paint two of the walls something plain.”

Terry huffed. “You mean paint over this new, expensive wallpaper?”

“Or take some of it down? Maybe we could reglue it and hang it… Maybe in the office?”

“No way!”

Gavin decided this would be a good time for him to disappear.

🙂

The Ragtag Daily Prompt this morning that inspired my little tale is REPEATING SHAPES
The image I’ve used is from Pixabay, created by AnnaliseArt

Pink & Charcoal

~ Christine Goodnough ~ 3 Comments

The Ragtag Daily Prompt this morning was CHARCOAL. My first thought was of charcoal as a drawing medium. Some amazing pictures can be done in charcoal. But then I thought of the car colors my husband says were popular circa 1956: PINK & CHARCOAL.

1956 Ford Fairlane for sale #2319032 - Hemmings Motor News
If you have a hankering for “the good old days,” this lovely restored 1956 Ford Fairlaine is listed for sale in Hemmings Motor News (hemmings.com)

Living Blues

~ Christine Goodnough ~ Leave a comment

The Ragtag Daily Prompt this morning is CERULEAN BAY

Since we lack oceans here on the prairies, we pretty much lack bays, too. We make do quite nicely with our lakes and rivers, though, and a larger lake may have a small dip in the shoreline one might call a bay. And you’ll find some small crescent (in England a “close”) in the city dubbed Xxx Bay.

We don’t lack shades of blue, though. Saskatchewan bills itself as “the land of living skies” because we have a whole palette of blues and grays with white added in streaks, layers and mounds.

At times I’ve read books that involve an ocean voyage, where the writer talks of a water spout. Narrow tubes of water going up from the sea into the heavens — I’d love to see one of those!

We have a similar phenomenon on the prairie: we call them dust devils. Mini tornadoes, sometimes only a metre wide, sometimes two. They skip over the ground in an erratic path, picking up and swirling dust and leaves. You may be looking at a field of grain and see heads start to swirl in a random path that zips through the grain — and you know a dust devil has touched down.

I like colour descriptions as a rule. However, when novel writers describe the hero or heroine as having cerulean blue eyes, to me this sounds poetic. We just don’t think or talk that way. After all, when was the last time your friend told you so-and-so’s eyes are “cerulean blue”? We may say bright blue, dark blue, gray-blue, maybe even denim blue. But when writers get into really creative shades of eye colour like mocha espresso, cottonseed brown, or tea leaf green, this is unnecessary exaggeration, in my opinion.

I googled CERULEAN and find it’s a cross between aqua and turquoise. There’s some variety. I borrowed these paint chips from the SICO website; neither are named Cerulean, but are about the right colour.

Limpid Lagoon 6151-63
Limpid Lagoon

Cayman Blue 6151-52
Cayman Blue

Prairie Sunset

~ Christine Goodnough ~ 12 Comments

The Ragtag Daily Prompt today is BARK

I considered this from various angles, now here’s my response:

Prairie Sunset

I may have journeyed far and wide,
viewed many sights of worth;
I still call a prairie at sunset
the prize-winning scene on earth.

A ring of fire as the sun dips low
blushing the clouds on high
while waves of mauve and coral
wash over the western sky

In the dusk the bark of a coyote,
a nighthawk’s winnowing flight,
the sleepy coos of mourning doves
as twilight turns to night.

On Hues of Blues

~ Christine Goodnough ~ 6 Comments

I checked out the Ragtag Daily Prompt this morning: How Green Is Blue. If this is some expression in common use today, I’ll admit that I’m rather uncommon and have never heard of it. At any rate, I was struck by the unusualness of it.

But wait…is unusualness actually a word? My word processing programme accepts it but the built-in Word Press spell-checker highlights it as an error. (It highlights programme as an error, too, but I’m using Canadian English today.)

I slid my mouse over to the Merriam-Webster site and they list unusualness as the noun, with the adjective being unusual, though its awkwardness does cause my mind to stumble a bit. STUMBLE is the Word of the Day prompt word this morning.

For the word unusual M-W offers alternatives like unique, off-beat, curious, odd, peculiar. If you want another word for your tongue to stumble over, try chromaticity, which is “the quality of color characterized by its dominant or complementary wavelength and purity taken together.”

In The Eyes Of The Beholder

The hues of blues are a common debate at our house: my beloved sees every blue-green shade from aqua to turquoise as green, while I call it blue. For example, is this fence blue and the sign green? Are they both green? Or both blue?

Blue fence + quote

Likewise, are these ducks swimming in green water or blue?

Ducks.Amy Spielmaker

The Colour of Emotions

It’s interesting how, in English, certain colours have become attached to emotions. A blue sky is always a sunny, cheerful one. Not so with a blue day or a blue mood, which rather suggests depression. It could be that people were green with envy long before Shakespeare came along, but his use of “green-eyed jealously” forever sealed the colour and the feeling in the Anglo mind.

Thus if you say, “How green is blue?” folks may hear, “How much sadness is caused by jealously?” Knowing someone has what you want, or that others have so much more than you do, can get you down if you focus there. Human as we are, envy does cause us to stumble at times as we go through life.

Asking, “How blue is green?” could be interpreted as, “She’s depressed and that’s why she’s looking at others and thinking they are so much better off.” Sad to say, when a person’s depressed they are usually inclined to see “everybody else” as upbeat, prosperous, and content with life. Other sad, lonely, desperate folks tend to fall below their radar.

And now I’ve exhausted my thoughts on this topic and shall wish you all a day in the pink.