Crimson, gold, and ice-blue - the power of detailed description

This week I'm continuing with my re-write/edit of Auroradawn.  One of my faults is a tendency to under-describe my worlds, and I'm trying to fix that in this rewrite.  But because I'm an SF author, I'm having to create and describe a whole world.  That gives me wonderful freedom, but I can't rely on the reader to know what's there.  If I want them to 'see' Vedrana, I have to describe the planet in enough detail to allow them to do that.

As in so many things, the devil is in the detail.  In my earlier draft, I had a description of summer alpine meadows dotted with red, blue, and yellow flowers.  But what shade of red or blue were they?  And is the yellow a weak pale lemon, or a deep strong gold?

It's that sort of thing I've been fixing in my re-write.  The flowers are now crimson, gold, and an ice-blue that reminds Arrien of a winter sky in the mountains.  I've described some of the paintings on the walls of the great house, works painted and drawn by Arrien's brother, Baak.  One of them is a graphite pencil study of Arrien and her mother.  As the mother has just died, this has special poignancy for Àrrien.

Describing the paintings also allows me to fill in more of Baak's history.  Two years earlier Baak ran away from home, after a long series of rows with his ex-military father, who didn't recognise his artistic talent.  It's a familiar scenario, a sensitive child having their talents ridiculed because they don't fit their parents' dreams for them.  Describing the brilliance of Baak's artworks allows me to tell the reader that Baak really is a talented artist, and that his father was wrong to rubbish his work.

And this detail also functions as a sneaky set-up for book two of the trilogy.  In book two the riddle quest switches to finding clues in symbols incorporated into paintings.  The reader doesn't know that at this stage, but in book two Arrien will be forced to find a series of paintings, and identify and decode clues wrapped up in symbolism in those works.  By then I've already established Baak's talent and knowledge of art, so it's natural that he would take the lead in searching for those clues.  Which allows Arrien to keep the matter within the family.

The challenge of detail in the second book is about inventing symbols, colour associations, and delving into the history of painting.  But that's a whole new story.