Describing colours

I see that Roselle has done a recent blog post called ‘Shades of yellow’ and this reminds me both of a post I've done of the same name and of Roselle’s novel-writing course which I followed a couple of years ago.

One of the exercises on the course was to describe a scene, being precise about colours – not just saying that something was ‘brown’ for instance but describing the particular shade of brown. I realised that, because I’m not a painter, I didn’t have words for the different shades (eg umber, sienna, sepia – as my Thesaurus tells me) but could only describe them in terms of other objects, eg ‘chocolate’ brown.

So here is my attempt on my walk yesterday to describe the many shades of yellow I saw.

The usual description of this colour is 'buttery' but, looking closely, I see that there are darker bits - 'burnt butter' perhaps

The word that springs to mind for this lichen is 'sulphur' but I've never seen sulphur so 'mustard' would be more honest

Daffodils are supposed to be the epitome of yellow but they do have a 'sulphurous' tinge . . .

. . . unlike these celandines whose yellow is pure sun, pure joy - albeit with egg-yolk in the middle

I have no doubt about the colour of this string - it's 'lemon'

And that's not a good image on which to end this post, but that's the countryside for you. Perhaps I should end it instead with this picture of Ellie and the baby rabbit she caught.

As Frog says, it's the (terracotta) sandy paws that are most pathetic