Using colors bold and bright
But all the colors mix together
To grey
And it breaks her heart"
Gray or "grey" is the one commonly-recognized color that is most desaturated — in its plainest form, it doesn't go anywhere on a color wheel. It stands in the middle. Gray can thus personify boredom, depression or emotional numbness. However, gray is also associated with fairness and neutrality, never giving you too much or too little. In moral symbolism, gray also represents moral complexity, where nothing is quite clearly good or bad, or a middle point to bizzare forms of morality, but shades of both. Gray can also be a beautiful color in its own right, especially celebrated as the color of silver and the hue of mist.
Technically, black and white are both shades of gray, but they are more commonly considered colors in their own right. The colors most commonly associated as gray (for example, silver) include most of the shades lighter than black and darker than white. Gray can also be a middle point between complementary colors such as red and green, orange and blue, and yellow and violet/purple; mixing with these combinations of equal amount can lead to chromatic grays in contrast to mixing black and white.
See also Shades of Conflict.
Categories:
Tropes
- Deliberately Monochrome: A purposely limited color palette.
- Alternate Monochrome Version: An official alternate version of a work that already exists in color, but rendered in monochrome for stylistic/artistic purposes.
- Monochrome to Color: When color is restored to a monochromatic setting.
- Old-Timey Cinema Countdown: An old-fashioned monochrome countdown before movies.
- First Gray Hair: When a character finds a grey hair in their otherwise non-grey hair, they freak out about getting old.
- Gray Is Useless: Unusable items are colored gray.
- Death Is Gray: A dead or powerless thing turns gray.
- No Power, No Color: When something loses power, it goes monochrome.
- Gray Rain of Depression: The combination of depression or sadness and rain to often used to exaggerate one's mood.
- Grayscale of Evil: When someone or something's that devoid of color is depicted as evil.
- Grey-and-Gray Morality: When opposing sides are neither completely "good" nor completely "evil".
- A Lighter Shade of Grey: When an Anti-Hero is more heroic than an Anti-Villain.
- Gloomy Gray: Gray used to signify sadness.
- Icy Grey Eyes: A person has eyes that are grey in color.
- Grey Goo: Nanobots and other mechanical substances which are usually grey in color.
