Ordering Color: Fantasy

Ordering color is a bit trickier than you might expect. First, there are always the colors that people associate with the province or town, which in our case means quite a bit of different shades of blue. We need blue for clothes, flowers, the sky, water, and the cliffs that litter our province. It's an important part of everything, and because it isn't fixed in place--can't be, since this is a public resource and not just someone's painting or postcard--it tends to drain off and be drawn to the places that can afford very little color of their own. It wouldn't be so bad if that didn't take away our color, too. We get a fair amount of tourism, and part of that is the color of the nature landscape. I've got a standard ordering chart for different times of the year, so that we can pull back and replenish at least the most famous areas, the ones that are really important to both our identity and the tourist trade. Even in hard times, that gets ordered right after the food. After the basic package, though, it becomes a lot more tricky. There are certain shades of blue and green that belong with ice and snow, though a lot of places skimp on color in the winter, reasoning that gray and white are after all perfectly natural colors that will stick around on their own. Some clothes are color-fixed, but those are generally quite expensive, and a crowd scene becomes grim itself when everything around it is. It also emphasizes the class barrier in a way that I don’t think is quite healthy.


Inspiration: A reminder email about ordering new printer ink.
Story potential: Low.
Notes: Very low.