Children’s books illustrator Loren Long, illustrator of the Otis the tractor series, “Of Thee I Sing,” by Barack Obama, “Little Tree” and “Love,” which will be published Jan. 9, recently revealed that he is colorblind. He had kept it a secret early in his career because he thought it would hurt his ability to get hired, and he didn’t want to call attention to himself. But he’s known he has been colorblind since he was 14-years-old, when he was also diagnosed with a little bit of nearsightedness. One in 12 men have some color vision deficiency. Long said that in general, he cannot tell the difference between the shades of brown and green or blue and purple. Long went to school and learned color theory, or the science of color, and he works with tubes of paint that have the names on them. His wife is his main color consultant, along with their two sons, but before that, it had been his mother or his friends or the person in the cubicle next to him. He told The New York Times that he got good at asking for help.
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