[Suggestion] What colours should I use in describing my pony?

[flutterscotch]

Hello everyone!

Your friendly neighborhood Flutterscotch, who had many classes in colour theory and several jobs being a printer's lackey, is here to talk to you about the subject of colours!

We see a lot of different ways that people describe their ponies, colour-wise, some precise and easily understandable, and some...well, some not so much, especially when you get into names cooked up by marketing people, much like what might be listed on the MLP wiki.

Sometimes they're just straightforward, like this description of Celestia:

[colour=#000000]Coat colour[/colour][colour=#000000]: So light pink it's nearly white.[/colour]

[colour=#000000]Mane/Tail colour & Style[/colour][colour=#000000]: Cyan, Light Pink, Periwinkle, Pale blue-green.[/colour]

[colour=#000000]Eye colour[/colour][colour=#000000]:Purple[/colour][colour=#000000]

[/colour]

[colour=#000000]And that is all well and good, most of us know those colours from our Crayola days, but just seems to lack a little pizzazz, so people sometimes seek to spice up those colour descriptions a bit. [/colour]

I am not here to say what is right and what is wrong...But when you tell us your gardener pony's mane is PMS 292 (uncoated), Columbia Blue (the Pantone marketing name of the same colour) or Chateau (a close Plochere equivalent), or even just #75B2DD, reader might look at you a little funny. While these are precise and 100% acceptable ways to describe a colour, (and if you are working in the printing or design industry, the way you SHOULD be referring to these colours) they leave the reader a little flat. This is especially so if the colour names don't seem to be thematically linked or the colour name is insider jargon that is not commonly used that people have to look up, but they don't even know what colour naming system you are using!

An extreme example of this is describing Celestia like this:

]Coat colour: Heavenly Charm [colour=#808080](a Plochere colour that's almost white, but has the tiniest hints of pink)[/colour]

[colour=#000000]Mane/Tail colour & Style[/colour][colour=#000000]:[/colour] a flowing mane comprised of Ozone[colour=#808080] (Pantone 2915, which is pretty close to 292)[/colour], Pinocchio [colour=#808080](again from Plochere)[/colour], Carissma [colour=#808080](pulled off a web based colour guide) [/colour][colour=#000000]and [/colour]Madang [colour=#808080](again from a colour guide from the web, which I guess as a place name evokes a sort of green, maybe, if you make the correlation to the tropics?)[/colour]

[colour=#000000]Eye colour[/colour][colour=#000000]: Strikemaster [/colour][colour=#808080](again pulled off a web based colour guide)

[/colour]

[colour=#000000]If you did not know what Celestia looked like, or didn't have a picture at hand, or weren't involved in the industries that use those colours, would you know what that means?[/colour]

However, if you tell us that same pony's mane is the colour of a forget-me-not, or a crisp September sky, it not only evokes the feelings of the colour, and ties your character to that emotion, and leaves it open to the other readers to describe your pony without having to look up a marketing-based colour name. If you post the hex code 75B2DD in parenthesis after a descriptive colour, it also tells us exactly what colour we would need to digitally create that character.

To pull from Dio's application for Princess Celestia because I think it's a good example of theme naming that tells us what colours are used, but also thematically ties them together with the colours of precious and semi-precious gems that not only serve as descriptive words of those colours, but evoke grandeur and sparkle befitting our princess.

[colour=#000000]Coat colour[/colour][colour=#000000]: A pearly pink colour, very nearly white ([/colour][colour=#000000]#FFF9FD[/colour][colour=#000000])[/colour]

[colour=#000000]Mane/Tail colour & Style[/colour][colour=#000000]: Mane and tail of many colours kept aloft by her own innate magic. Streaks of aquamarine ([/colour][colour=#5CB5D5]#5CB5D5[/colour][colour=#000000]), jade ([/colour][colour=#58CEAC]#58CEAC[/colour][colour=#000000]), sapphire ([/colour][colour=#92AEEF]#92AEEF[/colour][colour=#000000]), spinel ([/colour][colour=#E0A7F8]#E0A7F8[/colour][colour=#000000])[/colour]

[colour=#000000]Eye colour[/colour][colour=#000000]: Amethyst ([/colour][colour=#553B6B]#553B6B[/colour][colour=#000000])

[/colour]

You could do this thematically with nearly anything. I could describe Celestia using flowers as a base of description

[colour=#000000]Coat colour[/colour][colour=#000000]: The colour of a white rose.[/colour]

[colour=#000000]Mane/Tail colour & Style[/colour][colour=#000000]:Flowing in in streaks the colour of cornflowers, bluebells, lilacs and green hellebores.[/colour]

[colour=#000000]Eye colour[/colour][colour=#000000]: Iris [/colour][colour=#000000]

[/colour]

[colour=#000000]Even if you don't know what all those words mean, they evokes a certain kind of palette. It evokes pale spring colours, pastels.[/colour]

[colour=#000000]Yet if I was describing Pinkie Pie, I MIGHT go into candies and confections ([/colour][colour=#000000]Because is she colour of Wintergreen mints, bubble gum and Cotton Candy or WHAT?[/colour][colour=#000000], or even fun marketing not based on nature or historical context words like Charissma and Radiant + their Hex equivalents to describe her colouring, if I could find applicable ones. [/colour]

There are a whole lot of different standardized colour-naming systems out there, many of those colour-naming systems pull from a combination of the two big ones (Pantone and Plochere), with the addition of the standardized web colour names and some other sources.

• Pantone Matching System(for the printing and manufacturing of standardized inks. Not all colours match up from ink to CMYK or RGB, and even beyond that you have coated and uncoated, plastics, etc, etc, etc and even custom colours (like Coca-Cola red) A Pantone 292 from all those systems, and even the Hex code equivalent is slightly different.
  
• Plochere colour System - based heavily in the interior design industry. I have not worked with this one much beyond picking out a colour to match a Pantone colour.
  
• Web colour names
  
• Name that colour (a web utility)
  

Chose your colour names wisely

I will, however, give HUGE nerd bonus points for anyone who apps a graphic designer pony and does lay out their exact PMS specifications. Because Pantone jokes are hilarious.

[RarityDash]

Very good advice. Far too often do I see colours listed on apps that just make me scratch my head in confusion. Apps exist as a resource for both you and the players you meet in the RP; if a player looks at your app trying to figure out what colour your pony's coat is for reference and still can't figure it out from what you've written, it's failing in its very purpose.

Pretentious colour names will not impress anyone and when they create confusion make your app categorically less effective.

[Hippo]

Sometimes I list my colours if they are associated with something else in pop culture. I say that my OC Arrow Plain's pelt colour is Kodak yellow. I don't know what that exact colour is called, but everyone knows what kodak yellow looks like.

Pepto Bismol pink, Coca-cola red, Pepsi blue are all examples of using name brands to explain colour.

[Bellosh]

In my case, I always found listing colours to be somewhat of an annoyance compared to the glory of writing down all of an OC's history and stuff. I suppose now that I got my character summaries down pat, I can use this guide to improve my "colouring" sections.

PS: I'd really like to see a guide for creating mane styles for OCs. I really, really stink when it comes to that department.

[Rosewind]

Very good advice. Far too often do I see colours listed on apps that just make me scratch my head in confusion. Apps exist as a resource for both you and the players you meet in the RP; if a player looks at your app trying to figure out what colour your pony's coat is for reference and still can't figure it out from what you've written, it's failing in its very purpose.

Pretentious colour names will not impress anyone and when they create confusion make your app categorically less effective.

This is all true, except for the colour of "sandcat."

My advice is to make your application look neat, organized, easy to read, and use rich descriptions to give the reader a good idea of what your character looks like. The key is balance. "Shimmery sea-green blue" sounds better than "blue." Likewise "Aqueous shades of dazzling emerald imbued with facets of flaming sapphire" might be a little over the top.

[flutterscotch]

Likewise "Aqueous shades of dazzling emerald imbued with facets of flaming sapphire" might be a little over the top.

Unless you are describing the limpid pools of Unicornelius' eyes, which I am pretty sure are described in a similar manner, and if not, I need to change them.

[Autumn]

Maybe we should look into an F.A.Q. section for posts like this?

...and have a little bonus Colour picker.

[flutterscotch]

Yes, Autumn, that might be really helpful! As you have witnessed, we get a lot of "I don't know how my pony should look" or "I don't know what to name my pony" chatter in chat and it would be nice to be able to point them to one place.

I can think of a bunch of other resources that can help RP people like this that do not necessary fall under the category of rules or guidelines we enforce, or board canon, but are more just to help our users out when they're stuck with character creation or roleplay.

Good colour picker too. I like that it's embedded. It appeals to my sense of not having to click too much to reach content. I'm gonna put it in the first post.

[Rosewind]

I agree, that colour picker is fantastic! We should definitely make use of it! Is there a specific way to embed it, or is it Autumn magic?

[Hippo]

i personally just try to outsource my colour references. Even the canterlot.com theme colour editor gives me problems sometimes. Nothing really that bad, just inconvenient enough for me to try and look for colour codes elsewhere. Canterlot has a good selection of colours in the post editor, but sometimes they lack the exact colour im looking for, and even if I can use the canterlot colour map, it takes me longer to find what im looking for because my colour design is more topical than mathmatical. For instance, if Im looking for a certain colour red, i look up where ive seen that shade of red before, and then use a colour ID program that is on my desktop. Its a nice fancy little tool.

[flutterscotch]

i personally just try to outsource my colour references. Even the canterlot.com theme colour editor gives me problems sometimes. Nothing really that bad, just inconvenient enough for me to try and look for colour codes elsewhere. Canterlot has a good selection of colours in the post editor, but sometimes they lack the exact colour im looking for, and even if I can use the canterlot colour map, it takes me longer to find what im looking for because my colour design is more topical than mathmatical. For instance, if Im looking for a certain colour red, i look up where ive seen that shade of red before, and then use a colour ID program that is on my desktop. Its a nice fancy little tool.

If you get used to how hex codes work, though, you can use one of these kinds of pickers and adjust the string.

[Hippo]

If you get used to how hex codes work, though, you can use one of these kinds of pickers and adjust the string.

yup

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((colour taken straight from fluttersctoch's avatar))