Ashamed of Color Blindness

I remember this story as the first time I really realized that my vision of colors is different to others. I suppose I knew before that I was suffering from color blindness, but I couldn’t really classify it until this morning at school. It was the my second year at primary school and we were painting with water colors. I am not a great painter, neither I was at that time but I colored a nice landscape. Some hills and grass, maybe a house, the sun, everything was nice and colorful until, yes until I started to fill in the sky.

Blue, of course it had to be blue. And what a nice blue I mixed together. So I started painting on one side making my way to the middle of the picture. Suddenly an other child stopped by started giggeling and pointed at my sky color.

Yes, what a shame, it was all pink.

I really felt ashame. How could I possibly mismatch those two colors? I tried to cover the messed up part of my picture but it didn’t really work out. So my sky was blueish-pinkish. Great. I remember that I couldn’t stand it that I colored this last part of my painting just with a completely wrong color. Color blindness simply presented on an otherwise wonderful piece of art. Now I even could make out the difference. As soon as they told me, I could see that I have chosen the wrong color. But it was to late, to late to fix it. What a shame.

Is color blindness something to be ashamed of? You say no; I say no but sometimes I just feel so. Ashamed of not being able to tell if it matches or if something is of the right color or just choosing the wrong color and everybody can see it and then – afterwards – I realise it too. My color blindness I think is nothing to be ashamed of but sometimes I just am.

4 responses on “Ashamed of Color Blindness

  1. Tom

    I once coloured a tree trunk purple (apparently). Someone laughed and couldn’t believe I had mistaken brown for purple. As far as I can remember the shades were very similar (to me anyway).

    I did feel a little stupid but I knew why I had done it so it didn’t bother me that much. Anyway tree trunks can be all sorts of colours.

  2. Daniel Post author

    Mistaking brown for purple – hmmm, never happened to me. But as you say, there are so many different shades of every color, easy to mismatch any of them. And this beautiful photograph shows it very nicely: Tree trunks can really be colored with any color you like.

  3. Roger

    Hi, yes I’m colourblind too, and just starting out with art for leisure, so finding things a little frustrating.
    Drawing and monochrome are fine but as soon as colour is involved things go wrong.
    Folks say just paint as you see it but then it isn’t a true representation of the subject.