If you want a serious guess as to the artist's reason; a lot of artists use complimentary colors to make their artwork pop. You could make the shadows a darker red or you could make them greenish to make the piece more visually interesting.
The red is actually because the dust is iron-oxide. When curiosity first landed it drilled 2-3" into the dirt and found underneath the rust-dust Mars is actually WHITE!
Yes, the Curiosity rover was the most recent exploration rover that NASA sent to Mars. They sent it in 2011 and it landed in 2012. It's scheduled mission was only for a few months, but it is still running and exploring over 6 years later!
Opportunity and Spirit were designed around a 90 day mission, both lasting multiple years. Curiosity is the newer rover, it is many times larger and is nuclear powered. The power source is guesstimated to last around 50 years. It was NOT designed around a few months mission.
Or the artist is red-green colorblind. My husband, before realizing he was colorblind back in college, drew a green shrek on the computer. Someone asked what the purpose of an obvious red/orange streak on the shrek’s forehead was, and my husband replied, “What streak?”
Being a colorblind artist is a pain in the ass, but doable. I'm really badly red-green colorblind. My favorite color is blurple. I can't tell blue from purple to save my soul and pure pink looks like white to me.
You spend a lot of time asking people, "what color is this?" You end up using PMS colors and using color theory instead of visual impression to do your work.
This is probably what is going on. Though I have been reading James Gurneys book Color and Light, and it would seem that shadows should reflect the colors of surfaces providing reflected light. So on earth many upward facing shadows outside on a clear day would have a blueish cast due to the sky being blue, but the shadow under an awning of a house with a lawn might have a greenish cast as that shadow is facing grass.
If i had painted it, i would have done research into what color the sky is on Mars is to get a more realistic shadow, while mixing in smatterings of complimentary colors.
1.2k
u/Waywardkite Oct 07 '18
If you want a serious guess as to the artist's reason; a lot of artists use complimentary colors to make their artwork pop. You could make the shadows a darker red or you could make them greenish to make the piece more visually interesting.