"What’s It Like Being a Colour Blind Miniature Painter?" Topic

"Imagine a tabletop where pink orcs battle green-skinned high elves. Where yellow dwarves hold out against hordes of blue-furred ratmen.

This is, of course, a highly exaggerated scenario of what it might be like to be a colour blind (or "colour deficient", as my optician recently corrected) miniature painter.

I mean, for one, the colours of paints are written on the pots. So it'd be incredibly hard to get things so "wrong"…"

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Armand

I used to work with a color-blind computer artist. Other artists just made sure he was using the 'right' color gradient, so that skin looked like skin.

On a computer, you can easily get a chromatic breakdown of your colours, so you can label your palette. Likewise, all my paints have labels on them, so two different hues of similar saturation are pretty easy to separate. Of course, on a computer, it's much easier to shift colouring after the fact.

No digital shifting here … inlgames.com/grey.htm

Thanks.

Armand

I was told the tale of a color blind gamer who carefully labeled all the lids of his paints. One time he accidentally scrambled a few and discovered this when he showed up to proudly show off his newly painted Zulus and they were all greenskins.

I failed my Navy physical because of defective color vision. Not one to take that lightly, I went to an eye doctor for evaluation. He'd been a doctor with USAF and told me he'd let plenty of guys into the AF Academy with worse color vision than I had. I sent his report in to the Navy, who still didn't want me.

Years later, I took a different test that did not involve finding numbers or letters in the dots in a circle. Instead, it asked me to put chits in an order based on their colors as I perceived them. It was believed to be more accurate than the older test. I passed, thought admittedly there were two chits I could tell went beside each other, though I didn't know which went first. I guessed and got it right.

So, yes, I read the color written on the bottle. I try to remember which ones go together for highlighting. I suspect that my reds may be a trifle off sometimes, and as shades get to the point of being almost black (think dark navy or dark hunter green) I have trouble and depend more on the labels.

My problem is limited to a small portion of the visible spectrum, unlike my wife, who will from time to time bring me two T-shirts and ask which is the green one and which is the blue one. Not supposed to be a girl problem, but sometimes . . .

Grelber

From a Navy damage control perspective, being able to connect the hose to firefighting water vice jet fuel by colour is somewhat important … (of course, not putting quick-connect firefighting fittings on the end of fuel lines is also kinda important)

Thanks also…

Armand