Color for everyone - Fact, fun and tips

Yoo hoo, hue can do things for you.

Colours can tell you if a banana is ripe enough to eat (yellower); if there’s sufficient decoction in your coffee(browner); whether the boss is mad at (red) or in love with (redder) you. Whether the weather is hot or cold, whether the leather is weathered. Whether your mother-in-law is going to visit you. Not true, just put it in, to make colour sound important.

Colours can make you drool over a piece of art, a bowl of ice cream, a pair of lips…not necessarily in that order. Colours can affect your brain, if any. They can make you go red with anger, green with envy, yellow with fear, oranges with lemons, black and blue. Colours also heal, according to some therapists and can bring you luck, bad or good, according to occultists.

Colours help you be attractive to that special person or win that corporate game. Colour plays an important role in power dressing, window dressing and crossdressing. Colours help you design the perfect home or win first prize in the art contest. The colours on your visiting card communicate to your clients and friends: tell them whether your company is stylish and corporate, arty farty, or plain boring. Cols on a poster could make you buy that cool pair of coolers, trousers or undies. BTW, dry your white clothes in the sun and coloured brights in the shade. His coat of many colours got Joseph into trouble. But he was such a straight man that Pharaoh made a ruler out of him. Old joke, sorry, but not an off-colour one. Off-c jokes or jokes that are welcome in impolite society may be found below.

African Americans were called ‘coloured’ long ago. If you are sailing under false colours, you are an impostor, Sir! Pirate ships literally used to do this to deceive lootable vessels. A touchstone was an alchemist’s tool that showed by its colour change the nature of the metal rubbed against it. A toadstone was supposed to sweat and change colour when poison was in its proximity and also remove the poison. Health stones lose their colour when the owner is in ill health. Legendary alchemist’s items, those, like the philosopher’s s, no bonafide certificate will be issued by me.

When I was a kid, telephones were black, walls were ‘whitewashed’, buses and postboxes were red, cars had only a limited selection of colours, and grass was green. Now, everything has changed as if their moms were frightened by rainbows, whitewash is what politicians do and grass is something people ought not to smoke. Colour photographs and movies were still a novelty those days and television, where available in India, was black and white. Now movies and TV have glorious colour unless something’s wrong with the equipment. From web design to automobiles, colour is an important tool in the hands of today’s designer. A wrong colour can kill your market and a good one can help sell your wares.

Mr Dumbo goes to TV store and asks them if they have colour TVs. “Yes, Sir, we do.” “Then give me a Red TV.” When I was a comic strip artist, one of my comics had a colourful villain called Dr Vib Gyor whose hair-colour kept changing. He became a dull grey when depressed. I do, too. And my comp’s switch turns a bright blue when depressed.

“Drawing is of the spirit; color is of the senses.” – Henri Matisse.

“The fact is, that, of all God's gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. ... and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.” - John Ruskin.

Two artists: one a painter; the other a writer. Both loved colour, like you and me.

Being colour-savvy is an art by itself. Curving fronds of orange and pink bougainvillea against a pale blue sky; pale yellow beaches blending with the deep blue sea in a margin of white and green; yellow and red specks of fruit like stars in the sky of your tuttifruti bowl; these bring out the poet in your heart, if any. But drink your ice cream now; it’s all melted. What a lot of hues, what a range of tints and shades! All this even though we perceive only a fraction of colours that actually exist in the universe; our eyes are equipped to see only those hues in the spectrum with wavelengths between violet and red. Who knows what colours aliens, or animals equipped to see ultraviolet and infrared colours, can see? Women recognise more shades, tints and hues than men usually do. They are more colour savvy. Unless the man is a fashion designer, interior decorator, graphic artist, great artist, a reader or the writer of this series of articles.

An interesting thing I noticed about men who are into colour: they are not chauvinists and get along with women better.Before we start, I wish to thank Lodur, the Scandinavian god who gave us colour.

Whew! I’m blue! And in case you are out there, “Hi, Mom!”

So, colourful reading, and look forward to Part Two!

http://hubpages.com/hub/Color-Part-2---The-Blues

http://hubpages.com/hub/Color-Part-3---Give_em-Red