Color Deficiency

Whenever I mention to people that I’m colorblind, they often react with surprise. A colorblind artist? Surely, that doesn’t make sense. And yet, Beethoven composed some of his greatest work while he was near-deaf. Colorblindness—or more properly, color deficiency—is simply a hurdle that an afflicted artist must learn to overcome.

Color deficiency is a condition that is largely misunderstood. I have what is commonly known as “red-green colorblindness”, but the term actually encompasses several different types of color deficiency, including mine, a strong protanomaly. Color deficiency is exactly as it implies: a weakness of the eye’s ability to see particular wavelengths of light that contribute to my ability to see color.

Protanomaly means that the L-cones in my eyes—the ones that see long wavelengths which peak in the red area of the color spectrum—are deficient, making it difficult for me to see colors with red light in them accurately, like yellows, oranges, and purples. This means that I confuse a lot more colors than red and green—in fact, I rarely confuse the two. What I do struggle with is distinguishing bright greens from yellows, greens from oranges, deep blues from purples, and dark reds from black.

If you’d like to learn more about color deficiency, you can take a look at Colblindor, a website dedicated to information and resources dedicated to color deficiency.

Color Deficiency and My Art

While I don’t suffer from protanopia—that is, total failure of the L-cones—my protanomaly is very strong, and makes working in color a real challenge. For a long time, I received a lot of negative feedback relating to my colors, because they were inaccurate and obviously not very appealing, and it was very discouraging. Eventually I simply stopped working in color because I couldn’t work out any way to do it without spending a ridiculous amount of time checking and re-checking my colors (this is why my Rescue Rangers comic is black-and-white—it started during this period).

It was when I decided to pursue professional freelance illustration that I started searching earnestly for a method to add color to my work; color illustration is much more in-demand than black-and-white or greyscale, and adding some form of color to my work would make my work more marketable. I can’t remember precisely when I started experimenting with watercolors, but it was immediately apparent that they represented a major advantage for me: watercolors are often impressionistic in nature, and most people don’t expect watercolors to be perfectly accurate, or to carry a lot of detail in the color (although watercolors can certainly be used to create very detailed work). This willingness to accept color variation gives me a great deal of wiggle room to work methods for selecting and using colors that rely on tools rather than eyesight, and come to an end result that is not just satisfying, but beautiful.

I like to tell this story because many people I’ve talked to have expressed disbelief that any artist could succeed with such a marked disadvantage, and I want to encourage you that hurdles can be jumped if you’re willing to be a little flexible, and keep trying, and never give up.