360 degrees: Colors

Colors. The texture of our life, the hue of global ambiance, and the complexity of symbolic universitality. The significance of this wonderful element ranges from child's play to cultural  definition. Color encapsulates so much within our lives and can be looked at through so many angles and aspects.

One of these aspects is upon the level of art. They provide the intensity to a truly vivid picture and help envelop the beauty of reality (people, the environment, etc.). Without it, there wouldn't be the same level of beauty in art as there is made possible by the wonderful pigments we know today.

Another aspect is the level of symbolic significance. For example: the color red is seen as a symbol for both blood and death as it is a symbol of love and forgiveness. Green is a symbol for trickery and decietfulness, as well as a symbol for vitality and life. Colors hold multiple special meanings that are explored throughout our cultures.

Colors also hold extreme religious significance. In Christianity, redemption can be represented by the color red for the blood that Jesus shed. Green can be seen as a sign of the serpent, thus the devil (represented in the story of Adam and Eve). Green can also be seen as a religious symbol of life and nature- thus hope for eternal life. And white is seen as a symbol of purity and cleanliness. As you can see, colors hold great significance in the aspect of faith and belief.

Colors are also great cultural definers. Flags are represented through nationalistic colors. Also, certain celebrations held close to individual societies are represented through colors.

For example, to name a few:
Christmas: Red and Green
Mardi Gras: Purple, Green, Gold
Thanksgiving: Brown and Gold

Colors signal these celebrations and the society (or nation) that embraces them.

Colors do have incredible significance and meaning beyond the art room. They hold great symbolic significance, cultural and religious meaning. They truly do have aspects that revolve 360 degrees.

Working on the Kite Runner Essay allowed me to open up upon myself. It provided insight as to how I think, more specifically how I construe and correlate things to one another, how effective I am in transferring my thoughts eloquently upon paper, and all in all my thought process or method in writing.

Writing this paper, I was especially conscious about the rhythm of my writing. The dynamics create a strong beat and creates a flow necessary to captivate any reader. I focused heavily on the rhythm of individual words, but more importantly the sentence structure as a whole. The dynamics of my thought had to come cleanly and smoothly to the mind of the reader. I attempted to captivate this thought process through the accent upon certain words, and the beat of a sentence. For example- to describe the culturally broken Afghanistan I created a litany of features that provided a "droning" feel to represent the drabness and sick modern Afghanistan. For this assignment, in particular, I really capitalized upon this technique and practice and enjoyed the changes I made to my overall writing. I was surprised at the flow it created and knowing that I consciously decided upon this word choice I grew to appreciate the multitude writers involved in a higher class of writing.

During this process of constructing the essay, I also focused on the contrast in thought that created an intelligent clash between these ideas. For example, I compared Amir's past to the present torn homeland to really bring out the cultural dynamic change. Using this technique, I really opened myself to the other areas of writing, and consciously recognized other writer's techniques within their work. I always subconsciously recognized the brilliance of these techniques but now truly appreciate them for what they are- the paper has opened me up to the greater view and technique within writing.

This paper has gone beyond the average sophomore writing assignment- as beyond a test of skill, it taught me so much and opened up my mind to a new realm of academia. I will make sure to focus on these skills, and practice them in papers to come. They create a brilliant underlying scheme for pieces of writing. I believe that I still have much to do in these categories, but this paper has launched this experience and thought process in the metacognition of writing.