They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, yet I truly enjoy the challenge of using descriptive language to paint a picture with words. My educational background is in visual art, and I believe that the skill in observation I developed while learning to draw influences my writing. One of my favourite lines from a novel is “the sky was as black as Prussian Blue” from The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary. This line may resonate more with painters who are familiar with the dark, saturated colour that emerges from the tube, looking like the darkest night sky, but the line still has power and is so appropriate coming from the main character, a down-on-his-luck painter. A painter knows that if you thin Prussian Blue with medium and spread it on a white ground, it shows itself to be the deep translucent blue of a medieval stained glass window, but in its pure state, it is truly a rich black.

Here’s an excerpt from Plain Jane Brown where I used some painting imagery to describe the scene:

She could see the ocean! The sun was up now, and its orange light glazed the sea. Jane gasped as the scene below her was revealed in the light. She saw sweeping green lawns edged with Royal Palm trees marching along the perimeter of the grounds. The winding paths, which had seemed so sinister in the dark, wound through multi-coloured foliage punctuated with pink, red, and yellow blossoms. The orange light of sunrise was beginning to fade now, and the cerulean blue of the sky competed with the azure of the water for brilliance.