Colour me inspired

Ever been in a DIY shop and noticed that paints have the weirdest and sometimes beautiful names? Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is go down to your local B&Q, or wherever you can get paint colour charts, pretend like your 14 bedroom manor really needs all the rooms repainting in all the colours, and take as many as you can fit in your pockets.

Back at your 14 bedroom manor/ your writing studio/ wherever you feel like, shuffle your deck of colours and pull out 5 random cards. Use the colour names in a paragraph or flash fiction story.

You can take this up another level by organising the names into types, like if there’s a lot of places, a bunch of animals or plants, some objects, and emotions/ sensations/ attitudes, sort them into these groups. This means you can let the cards decide the setting (log cabin) of your story, an object that’s important to it (blue jeans), an emotion, attitude or sensation that your character experiences (aloof), and an animal or plant that appears (raven). There’s often other categories, like textures (stone), or times of the day (midnight). All the words in brackets here are actual colour names, by valspar.

Happy playing.