Sunshine Challenge 2020 - Prompt 5 (Who's on Blue?)

This fifth Sunshine Challenge is for the colour blue. But what is "blue"?

I'm one of those people who sees a distinct colour between green and [what I call] blue. This intermediate colour has various names: printers call it "cyan"; and a lot of computer types very imaginatively call it "blue-green". Some people use the words "teal" or "aqua"; but, to me, these are more specific terms. (I'd use teal only for darker shades, and aquamarine for lighter ones.) To me, the general term is TURQUOISE, which is also what I'd name the focal hue, i.e. the ideal, perfect shade of the colour.

TURQUOISE lies between GREEN and BLUE:

So, from my perspective, in going straight from "green" to "blue", the Sunshine Challenge is leaving a colour out.

Oops.

But opinions differ. Is TURQUOISE really a separate colour? When I was a little kid, it never occurred to me that it wasn't. I only realized that not everyone agreed when I was in the second half of Grade Four. It was the day when our teacher, Mrs Smith, decided to give us a lesson in colour terms.
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Sunshine Challenge 2020 - Prompt 5 (Turquoise) & Website Updates

To me, turquoise is a cool, fresh hue that reminds me of water and the tiles you find in bathrooms and swimming pools. However, if you say "tiles" to any Forever Knight fan, they will immediately think of Natalie's office in the Coroners Building in Toronto.

The exterior views were filmed on location; but the interior was a permanent set. By positioning the camera behind whatever wall was broken away, it always looked a lot larger than it actually was, which—from the few steps needed for the actors to cross it—must have been pretty small. The most prominent feature was an autopsy table in the middle of the room, since Dr. Lambert (played by Catherine Disher) was a pathologist. But one corner had her computer and filing cabinets; and the opposite end had a lab desk; so it was by way of being a sort of all-purpose room that you'd never get in the real world. Let's just say that the series was done on a low budget!



[NOTE: if you can't see the picture, click on it: I put a link on.]

Most distinctive were the turquoise tiles that covered the walls from floor to ceiling.

Some years ago, when I was making icons for all the FK factions, I went through screencaps until I found one that had Natalie standing close to the wall. I carefully cropped out a tile, picking the one that the camera was pointed to dead on. As a result, the graphic "tiles" perfectly.



I promptly used it, in miniature, for the icon representing the NatPack, i.e. the faction for fans of Natalie. (Click on it to see it enlarged.)



However, I've also used the tile a couple of times when making webpages for stories that focus on Natalie in her role as pathologist, rather than her role as Nick's friend. The most recent is a ficlet, "Morgue Maniacs", that I wrote at the end of April as part of my attempt to keep busy while in lockdown. It features Natalie and her lab assistant, Grace, chatting on the night shift.

For its webpage, I complemented the authentic tile by bordering the central panel with nested tables whose most prominent feature is a band of coffee beans, representing the women's off-duty chit-chat. This came originally from GRSites.com; but I reduced it in size so that the detail could be seen in the relatively narrow width of the border. I trimmed it with ripply graphics that look a bit like turquoise ribbons bordered in gold, both derived from an original I got from 321clipart.com.

Sunshine Challenge 2020 - Prompt 5 (Blue)

So now we come to BLUE proper. To me, this is inherently a dark colour—though, of course, there are plenty of shades of blue from midnight to ice. It's the colour most associated with sapphires and delphiniums (though both come in quite different hues as well); and it's the colour of those little blue squill, Scilla sibirica, that are so commonly massed under shrubs in flower beds in the spring.

One association of blue is with the police; and one of my favourite fandoms, Forever Knight, is a cop show as well as a vampire show. Although Nick Knight himself is a plainclothes detective, there are uniformed officers in the police station in every episode; and they, of course, wear blue:




[NOTE: if you can't see the picture, click on it: I put a link on.]

In 2011, I wrote a story about Nick's first day in Homicide. "The New Guy" was written for lastscorpion in the small fandom-specific gift exchange, fkficfest. The story was originally posted to LiveJournal (where the exchange was then run) and later crossposted to AO3 and my website.

The plot of "The New Guy" is based on the flashback to a Season 1 episode, "Only the Lonely", which tells how he first met Natalie Lambert. It is canon, therefore, that he was brought into the morgue in a bodybag, having been blown up by a pipe bomb while trying to stop a robbery. Then, being a vampire, he regenerated on the autopsy table. To her great astonishment, of course; but she was intrigued enough to offer to research his condition in the hope of finding a way for him to turn mortal again.

At that time, Nick was not yet a police officer. (Or, at least, not in Toronto. Another flashback told us about his time as a uniformed cop in Chicago in the 1960s.) It was sometime thereafter that he contrived to join the Metro Toronto Police and get immediately assigned to work Homicide at the 27th Precinct.

Since "The New Guy" was about Nick as a policeman, I decided to go with a plain blue background, and bordered the central story panel with a textured blue and black border picked out in gold. I used a police badge in various sizes as a divider between the sections: this was clipped from a screencap. Admittedly, it was a close-up of Det. Schanke's ID. (He was Nick's partner in Seasons 1 & 2.) But Nick's would have looked the same.



When I later wrote two more canon-based stories told from alternative perspectives, "Shift" and "Copper's Instinct", I reused the same webpage design.