Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?
In Real Life, air/wind is colorless and invisible. In order for wind to be visualized in media such as animation and video games, wind will be color-coded.
In East Asian media, wind powers are displayed as green. In Western media, wind is often shown to be yellow, white, light blue, or pastel colors. Oftentimes, it is a Rule of Cool when wind is displayed in several rainbow colors. If electricity, or occasionaly sound, is added to wind powers, it would likely be yellow, purple, or blue.
See also Visible Odor for when scents are color-coded.
See also Technicolor Fire, about fire having multiple colors, Yellow Lightning, Blue Lightning, Yellow Earth, Green Earth, and Color-Coded Elements. Super-Trope to Wind Is Green.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- In Cardcaptor Sakura, the Windy Card, when released, is shown as a pale yellow woman with green accents and can cast green and yellow gusts.
Art
- One interpretation of the blue swirls from The Starry Night is that they represent a cold breeze going across the night sky.
Asian Animation
- BoBoiBoy: The titular hero's wind elemental's attacks are typically depicted as light blue, but during one instance when he was under strong emotional influence, the growing tornado which barricaded around him turns purple, signifying an abnormal amount of strength in his power. Moments later, BoBoiBoy Wind unlocks his 2nd-tier form, BoBoiBoy Cyclone.
Comic Books
- Red Tornado can fittingly generate red-colored gusts of wind.
Fan Works
- Destiny Intertwined: The magical energy associated with the Wind element comes in a variety of colorations. Grey is the most common, followed by teal, derived from Earth-heavy lineages, and by a variety of desaturated colors, produced by Electricity ancestry. The rarest variety consists of a grey lining around a brightly colored core.
Films — Animated
- Pocahontas: Alluded to in the song "Colors of the Wind", where Pocahontas sings about being able to paint with all the winds' colors as a metaphor for being In Harmony with Nature. Beautifully visualized in this shot
◊, where she transforms out of the wind.
Films — Live-Action
- Zoom: Academy for Superheroes: Dr. Marsha Holloway can breathe a rainbow-colored blast of wind.
Literature
- Fengshen Yanyi: the evil Mo Liqing of the Four Demon Generals can use his Azure Cloud Sword to summon a black-colored wind which also acts as a Razor Wind, shredding anyone touching it to pieces (and is also described as making the noise of thousands of blades scraping against each other). Similarly, the Howling Winds Formation will release a storm of black wind which sends the victim flying against an array of super-sharp blades. Another treasure tool, the Wind Purse, can summon squalls of black wind, though in this case it's not shredding, it just obscures vision.
- Journey to the West: the aptly named "Yellow Wind Great King" is a demon lord who has mastered the dreaded Wind of Samadhi, which is described as yellow in color and powerful enough to inconvenience Sun Wukong.
Live-Action TV
- Although green is the traditional Japanese color for wind, the Super Sentai and Power Rangers series mostly have the Pink Rangers (Dairanger, Magiranger/Mystic Force, Shingenger/Samurai, Goseiger/Megaforce) wielding wind powers, with the Red Rangers (Hurricanger/Ninja Storm, Goseiger/Megaforce, Zyuohger) coming in second. There's a wind-wielding white for Kakuranger, and the traditional green for Gingaman (though surprisingly not Lost Galaxy, as the elemental powers got Adapted Out for that series)
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer Fantasy: Invoked with the Winds of Magic, all of which are associated with a different color (Fire Is Red, Beasts are brown, Death is purple, etc.) and blow haphazardly throughout the world though most people and creatures cant actually see them and only perceive their effect. Where High Magic involves using all eight in a harmonious whole, Dark Magic involves grabbing all the magical power in the area and bashing them together, making its spells more powerful but also more unpredictable and dangerous.
Video Games
- In Final Fantasy VII, the enemy-only spell "Aero3" is represented as a circle of rainbow colors around a character and deals wind-type damage.
- Genshin Impact: Although the Wind element (Anemo) is colored green, it can be combined with other elements to create combination attacks that amplified the element with Anemo, and with that, the wind attack changes the color depending the element used. For example, a combination attack with Anemo and Pyro makes orange wind, with Electro makes purple wind, Cryo makes light blue wind, and so on.
- In Flight Rising the Wind flight and its god the Windsinger are both represented by pale green. Additionally, many Wind-specific festival items feature visible gusts of wind that are also colored green.
- Golden Sun: Jupiter Psynergy, the power of wind, lightning, and psychic powers, is represented with a purple orb in menus and its spells'/attacks' particle effects are depicted in purple, and Jupiter Djinn are lavender. The character designs for the main Adepts are given with a wide range of colors to complement the purple motif, with Ivan having a green cape over a purple tunic and Sheba having a white tunic under the purple cape, and both are blondes. In Dark Dawn, Karis has green hair, white clothing, and a purple cape, and Sveta has lavender hair and a red overtunic above the purple tunic.
- Pokémon: With the Flying type being close to air and wind, the menu icon is shown in lavender with occasional accents of light brown, and much of their attacks are shown in white or light blue. Fairy Wind, meanwhile, has a pink tint to reflect the Fairy-type's pink color code.
- In Tactics Ogre, wind and lightning magic, and its attacks and buffs, is portrayed in yellow, and its symbol is a yellow chevron, resembling a pair of wings.
Western Animation
- In Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, airbending is shown as "colorless" in the perspective of non-airbenders, but given swirling white, blue, or cyan gusts through the airbenders. The symbol of the Air Nomads is a gray and blue swirling orb, and are color coded in garish bright yellows and oranges, both in their clothes and in side materials.
- Captain Planet and the Planeteers has the Wind Ring, which contains a dark blue gem with light blue wisps emitting a white, pinwheel-patterned light.
- PJ Masks: Owlette's Owl Wing Wind attack creates red gusts of wind. And An Yu can use her dragon staff to create a gold colored gust of wind.
