Colours are a major part of our lives, perhaps even more so to an artist and writer.
We want to create and weave worlds that will
entice you in and then play out in vivid technicolour!
Colours play a huge part in Beneath the Rainbow and in much of my writing. Apart from a fall of snow, or torrential rain, or thunder and lightning, there’s not much else in nature that draws you to a window or an open door to gaze up at the sky than a rainbow!
Freya finds herself creating rainbows and it’s much harder than she ever imagined (as you can read in these excerpts):
“The science of rainbows left her somewhat defeated. She knew she had to influence the light and she knew she contained enough inherent celestial light to create a small rainbow, but it was the rain that had her beaten. It had to be in the right place and she had to use the existing sunlight to enhance her own fragile light. Dawn and dusk were optimum, just after sunrise for a few hours and another couple of hours before sunset. Midday and the sun was too high, and likewise the wrong time of year and the sun wouldn’t be in the right place either.
She couldn’t make it rain, and she couldn’t tell the sun when to shine, and she believed she’d never match the timings to the conditions.
There was one morning when Daisy, next door, stood alone in her dew-drenched garden, her elderly face upturned to catch the fresh morning rays, and Freya grabbed her opportunity. The sun was low and the air was misty. Freya spun in the sky and flung out her arms and screwed up her face in concentration.
The sun filtered through the pale mist and rested warm between Freya’s fingers. The rays played around Freya before they reached Daisy’s wrinkled skin and Daisy opened her eyes. The bright light played a trick on her before she blinked and turned away with blue/black spots dancing before her eyes. She glanced over the fence at her neighbour’s garden and drank in the beautiful fragrance of the summer freesias and lavender, and she remembered watching Freya picking bunches of freesias with her mother just the year before.
Freya’s image remained in her mind for much of that morning, but she missed the feint, very feint colours that had pervaded the morning dew.”
Colours soak through Freya’s life just like they do mine. She sees everything clearly and vibrantly, and as an observer, I’m very much the same. Colours speak to me and, as many of you will know, sometimes they coerce me into taking photographs… so here are my rainbows…and Freya’s bolded descriptions are from one of her rainbows (seen in the pictures used for the title photo above):
© Lisa Shambrook
Scarlet like remembrance poppies… and tulips, and berries, apples, and toadstools, and leaves, poppies, scarves, and books…
© Lisa Shambrook
Sunset Orange… and autumn leaves, and winter soup, roses, and beach sunsets, and fire, Californian poppies, and comma butterflies, and dragon-filled skies…
© Lisa Shambrook
Sunflower Yellow… and sunflowers, and rudbekia, lemon cake, laburnum, and roses, and daffodils, and crocus…
© Lisa Shambrook
Green, like her willow… and columbine leaves, oaks, acorns, and more spring leaves, and valleys, and firs, moss, and jewels…
© Lisa Shambrook
Blue the exact shade of Daddy’s t-shirt… and sky, and the Himalayan poppy, ocean, and hydrangea, and forget-me-nots, and many cloudless skies…
© Lisa Shambrook
Indigo the colour of deepening night… and dusk, and twilight, and denim, and woven book spines, and skirts, and the fall of night…
© Lisa Shambrook
Violet like Purple Ted… and Vinca, and campanula, lavender, and bluebells, and irises, and roses…
These are the colours in my life…
of flowers, and night, and water, and sky, the rainbows that colour my world…
What colours yours?
Freya fights to perfect her rainbow… and you can find out if she does in Beneath the Rainbow, available both in paperback and eBook at Amazon. Take a look and find out why she needs to make a rainbow…
Do you love rainbows?
Which is your favourite colour?
And what colours in nature inspire you the most?
The Last Krystallos 
I’m reading your book at the moment and the colours shine through. I love your photographic rainbow – you have a keen and sensitive eye, as well as the technical talent to produce pictures that tell their own stories.
The fact that the colours shine through so well in the book is lovely praise. Your ‘Strong As Death’ was similar, vibrant and lyrical! I need books to be colourful and visual x
Your descriptions are so vivid, particularly when describing the gardens.
Hi there this is kinda of off topic but I was wondering if blogs use WYSIWYG editors or if you have to manually code with HTML. I’m starting a blog soon but have no coding knowledge so I wanted to get advice from someone with experience. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I wish I could help, but I don’t have any knowledge of code, I literally just write a post and post it. WordPress is quite easy to get into, and there are lots of tutorials out there.