Everything I Know About The Color Burnt Sienna, late afternoon walk in the Rio Grande Valley bosque, photo © 2007 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.
Remember those boxes of Crayola Crayons you used in grade school? Eight in a box, and then each year you graduated to a bigger box — 16, 24, 48. Before you knew it you were up to 64, or maybe — if you were lucky and your parents rich — 120 crayons.
Good-bye brown and orange and blue! Hello Sepia, Burnt Sienna, Periwinkle!
Pick any color from the list of Crayola Crayon Colors and use it as a prompt: Everything I know about the color Sea Green or Prussian Blue… If you want, stick with one-word colors — Plum, or the metallics, Gold, Copper, Silver.
It doesn’t mean you have to write about color. Writing about Burnt Sienna might take you to yesterday’s walk in the woods just as the sun was setting, to how you almost twisted your ankle running in Danskos, to how your daughter asked you what kind of brown-orange plant it was growing at the base of a big cottonwood and the only thing you knew to tell her was “skunk cabbage.”
A prompt is simply the beginning. A line with your crayon in the Big Chief tablet.
So write, 15 minutes, on everything you know about the color ____________. If you’d prefer — instead of writing or in addition to writing — paint, draw, or photograph everything you know about this color. Now go!
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