Why I Started Coloring with Orange

I've had this weird aversion to the color orange for as long as I can remember. It wasn't a strong feeling because if it had been, I might have been conscious of it. It seemed every year I was in school, the school would demand 'new' school supplies, which meant more colored pencils. We'd just dump the rest into the big box at home and never really look at them ever again.

At least until I was older. Sorting them out, it became immediately clear that the oranges were almost never sharpened, still with the vertical ridges of the original factory sharpening visible even. I knew by then that I often had a preference for dark or cool colors-- blues, greens, purples, but also deep reds and golden yellows/browns, but I was still steering clear of orange.

Again, not sure why. In 7th grade, one of my favorite outfits involved a sleeveless orange tank and a long purple zippered jacket. Orange with purple seemed to be the only exception. In fact, some of my favorite tropical flowers are orange and purple.

Visually, the complementary colors also don't speak to me. I like purple with orange, not yellow. Blue with red, not orange. Green with yellow, not red. I think the whole red and green thing was something I found obnoxious about Christmas unless it was more like a burgundy and forest green. It would have been nice to know why I had a visual stubbornness, but at the same time, people were always complimenting me on my very different color choices.

One of the things I possess is a very handy Color Layout book I got in college. Even though I manage to find some great color combinations I resonate with, I still tend to find the fundamental 'complements' a lot pickier in my shade preference tolerance. Remember the fad involving hot pink and chocolate brown? I could dig that combo and I'm also not a fan of hot-anything where colors are concerned. I still think a bubblegum pink or turquoise is absolutely amazing with a brown, although fuchsia and brown is a close third.

I didn't want to be color stubborn. I didn't want to be inflexible or even start to lean too hard on pieces where people liked the colors. I liked to note that for future use, but I still intended to be experimental, to find other people's color preferences outside of my own.

Orange was not an easy color for me to want to use though. I ended up making peace with a creamsicle orange. A really vibrant orange cone shade can even work as a single focal point in a composition. Sometimes I lean out of orange and end up closer to peach, but I still try to find places for orange. As an artist, I need to understand how I can make colors work. There are many people who ask me to do art and they love the color orange. It just feels like I'm copping out if I won't do it because I don't like orange.

Hey, I've done the same with fears. Although I'm not going to list them in a public forum, there are many that I've turned from phobias to just uncomfortable and inconvenient. To me, my aversion to orange wasn't something I wanted to become comfortable with though. I wanted the challenge of using it to be stronger than my feelings for it. How could I use it in a way that didn't ruin the visual for me?

Of course, you'll probably find some speculative psychology behind it, but it doesn't sound like a solution nor will it really enlighten you about me. There are a lot of things that I realize are potentially destructive unconscious habits that, once brought to light, I find it most important to go ahead and challenge them.

What about you? Are you comfortable in certain anti-productive preferences or habits? How would challenging them help you grow?

All right, blogging is fun, but time to jump over to writing. I got a nice little break from it yesterday when my dear friend Emily paid a visit, but I should put a little mileage into it today. I have some scheduled posts attacking topics like bigotry and what we attack writers for writing about coming up, just in case I get a little too involved to remember to blog. Handy little thing, that. Makes me seem a lot more present or frequent even when I'm pounding out a few posts then disappearing for a week or so. See you around! Hope you find some fun rabbit holes to explore!