The Challenges of a Color Blind Landscape Painter
Of course, almost nobody is totally color blind, but a huge percentage of males are color blind to one degree or another. Mine is the most prevalent: mild red-green. Far less common is blue-yellow.
People with this type of COLOR BLINDNESS simply see the red and green components of colors that contain them, at lower brightness than those with normal color vision. This makes it nearly impossible to discern the difference between blues that are very slightly violet (have a small amount of red in them) from blues that don't. Same with blues that lean towards turquoise - the slight green content becomes too subtle to see inside all that blue.
What this means for someone painting landscapes is mainly keeping any green paint off the palette that is just never found in nature - Phthalo green being the worst offender there. In fact I don't use any green pigments, but mix my greens from warm yellows and cool and warm blues - which result in very quiet, natural green when used in any combination. I also use a couple of tube greens, but they are actually just premixed combinations of warm yellows and blues.
As far as the red goes, I've never had any interest in painting red barns or fields of flowers, so I limit myself to a safe mixture of colors that result in autumn-leaf reds and oranges, but will not combine to produce anything redder than that.
As has been said many times, the most important aspects of color are not hues, but the compositional balance of warms, cools and neutrals.
People with this type of COLOR BLINDNESS simply see the red and green components of colors that contain them, at lower brightness than those with normal color vision. This makes it nearly impossible to discern the difference between blues that are very slightly violet (have a small amount of red in them) from blues that don't. Same with blues that lean towards turquoise - the slight green content becomes too subtle to see inside all that blue.
What this means for someone painting landscapes is mainly keeping any green paint off the palette that is just never found in nature - Phthalo green being the worst offender there. In fact I don't use any green pigments, but mix my greens from warm yellows and cool and warm blues - which result in very quiet, natural green when used in any combination. I also use a couple of tube greens, but they are actually just premixed combinations of warm yellows and blues.
As far as the red goes, I've never had any interest in painting red barns or fields of flowers, so I limit myself to a safe mixture of colors that result in autumn-leaf reds and oranges, but will not combine to produce anything redder than that.
As has been said many times, the most important aspects of color are not hues, but the compositional balance of warms, cools and neutrals.