thedemonsurfer:hollyand-writes:turbootaku:mrnicholas:redhawke:Skintones for POC companions

thedemonsurfer: hollyand-writes: turbootaku: mrnicholas: redhawke: Skintones for POC companions in Dragon Age Whitewashing is a huge problem in every fandom, and DA is no exception. All of the characters above are whitewashed and have their skin lightened on a daily basis.  There is no excuse when someone whitewashes a character. Take your appropriate swatches if you must, and make sure you are staying true to the characters actual skin tone. Use these colours if you’d like - they were more meant to prove a point. You are certainly welcome to use them as a base. Stop whitewashing POC. Stop lightening skin, stop slimming down features, and stop blaming whitewashing on lighting. You know better than that. You can do better than that. Do not take swatches from the lightest part of the face - all the light colours shown here are meant for highlighting purposes. They are the highlights of the face, to be used to display light bouncing off the surface of one’s skin. Every image of the characters except Josephine was taken from the dragon age wiki site and was only altered to fit and blend with the pictures. All other graphics are mine.  Okay…so if you know me you know that whitewashing is a HUGE pet peeve of mine. And normally I’d be all up on this post screaming “YES, THIS!”  Because I agree with a lot of points in this, mostly the “ Do not take swatches from the lightest part of the face - all the light colours shown here are meant for highlighting purposes. “   however…it’s not this cut and dry. I want to make it perfectly clear that I agree with the majority of this post and while I’m not excusing this I would like to sit down and explain why people blame this on lighting. Skintones are HARD to replicate accurately. Especially if you haven’t put a lot of study into it. Color theory takes a long time to learn and most fan artists haven’t spent that kind of time trying to master it. Hell, even most professionals can’t do it perfectly. Most aren’t intentionally whitewashing. In fact, most are probably swatching from game stills to make sure they don’t whitewash and yet they still get called out for it. Why? For several reasons. 1) Photoshop tends to desaturate swatched colors. Darker skintones are pigmented therefore usually more saturated, therefore if the artist doesn’t realize this is happening they don’t realize the color has changed so they don’t consciously boost the saturation or shift the value. 2) Monitor discrepancy. For example my Dorian pic is significantly lighter on my pc than on my phone. Different monitor settings have a tendency to change color. Some of us like bright displays and some of us can’t handle that kind of light. Mine is turned down therefore sometimes when I paint things look TOO dark when in reality they’re not so what the artist sees on their computer and what you see on yours might be different. Digital art makes it hard to get colors perfect across the board. But lighting does factor in a great deal. The examples shown in the post above are all shown in similar lighting, but what happens when an artist wants a non-neutral light? Maybe they want a super bright sunlight or cool toned white light. What then? I took a few POC models in xna lara and lined them up. Notice how the skintones change. (In reality they’d shift a little more than this because xna lara is terrible at lighting) The “flat neutral” is the most accurate with their base textures. Can I just point out how light Fenris actually is in comparison to everyone else? Yet people get absolutely pissed if you paint him lighter than Zevran who is actually several shades darker.  And if I had painted Fenris ANY of the colors in any one of those pictures I would have gotten called out for whitewashing. In fact when I painted him (and as a rule in general) I took him at least two or three tones down from his actual color and boosted his saturation and still had a few comments about it. Now, this is all relative, but I’m just trying to illustrate why this is a complicated matter and why you can still follow all the rules and still get called out on whitewashing. The lighting and color scheme WILL completely shift color. To better illustrate this, may I invite professor Idris Elba. Same man, four skintone shifts. Four different lighting scenarios. Different swatches.  This is a problem because when finding references we think “Which screen should I should I try to match? Well, let’s say my lighting is similar to the second picture. Okay, great, I have my reference and I’ve swatched and compensated for the discrepancy. Fantastic, but WAIT, I still get called out because he’s not as dark as he is in 3 or 4 even though he wouldn’t be because my lighting isn’t neutral or dark, and the ambient color is different. I think “well fuck, I did the best I could and I matched my reference.” But the person criticizing thinks “he’s darker than that so you didn’t make him dark enough” and while, yes, that point is valid, it’s also not applicable in this particular situation.So you do another picture, this time in darker lighting, replicated picture number 3. Another person says “he’s more the color of number 4, you made him too light and too red.” Eventually you just don’t know how to approach without criticism anymore and what happens? A lot of artist then give up on learning dark skin tones. Which is the complete opposite of what we want, isn’t it? That’s not progress. In closing…while I’m sure there are some people out there intentionally whitewashing and they SHOULD be fucking called out for it because I can’t think of many things that piss me off more than that I absolutely have to point out that probably a ton of artists who get constant hate about this are probably just victims of lack of color theory knowledge and swatching from screens without realizing how inaccurate it can be sometimes. And that may be giving some of them too much leeway, but is that better or worst than automatically assuming the worst? This is why a lot of professionals tell you that it’s better to mix colors yourself,but can I reiterate again that SKINTONES ARE FUCKING HARD AS A BOG FISHER’S BALLS!  Most of those artists are already kicking themselves because they don’t know how to do everything perfectly, tearing them down over something as complicated as this only makes them feel like absolute shit. Educate them, by all means, but make sure your information covers all, not just one aspect.This kind of thing takes years and years to learn, (I don’t even know it well and I’ve been doing it for more than 10 years) it’s unrealistic to expect a set of swatches to have much effect when color and light come into play.  EDUCATION goes farther than CRITICISM. Please, if you have a problem with the way an artist is painting skintones educate them, don’t just assume they’re purposefully whitewashing unless you know for a fact they’re a complete bigoty douche. I realize I’ll probably get a lot of hate for this, but…as an artist I can’t get behind “lighting doesn’t actually change anything” when I know for a fact that it does. Does it always change things as drastically as people paint them? No. Does it excuse turning a brown person into a white person. Fuck no. But it is not some bullshit excuse artists use to hide racism. That idea is just as dangerous a misconception as the people who purposefully whitewash and just breeds contempt across the board. This was really cool, really thorough @mrnicholas. Thanks for this! As a POC who is thoroughly fed up of people in this shitty fandom being bullied over supposed “whitewashing” that isn’t even whitewashing (including, and maybe especially, other POC fanartists who get bullied over that shit) – THANK YOU SO MUCH @mrnicholas for actual sensible commentary on this issue. (Fun fact: I myself come out vastly different skin colours in my photos, depending on the lighting. Even more so, sometimes, than Idris Elba above.)  just as an aside to  “lighting doesn’t actually change anything” monet’s haystack series, which were a deliberate study on how the different lighting of times of day and seasons can get you a surprising variety of colors in the exact same subject.  we perceive objects when light bounces off of them and into our eyes, or is projected off of a screen. the hue and intensity of the light absolutely fucks with the ‘true’ color of whatever it is you’re looking at.  I agree with both of the above posts. there IS a difference in whitewashing a character and blaming it on the lighting and actually having your lighting affect your subject. dont whitewash POC characters, that’s not cool. but also before you start harassing folks for depicting a dark-skinned character with a lighter hue than you’d expect, really look at the art for a sec. what’s the lighting scheme? how do their colors match their environment? when was the last time you looked at the source material? are you remembering the colors accurately or have you gotten an idea of whats ‘right’?  critique is better than criticism. think critically, observe, speak up if a character is being whitewashed but try not to lash out at every depiction lighter than Mr. Elba #4 I’m glad we’re talking about this, because if there’s one thing that I feel like I see my fellow white folks fail to understand in every conversation about white-washing, the goal isn’t just “don’t white-wash.” The goal is “to depict darker skintones accurately and beautifully.” White-washing is the main error that occurs because folks don’t know how to make darker skin look beautiful, or don’t believe it is. We often think of only the latter as the core issue, but the first is one of the bigger sources of white-washing among less experienced artists. Accidental white-washing out of ignorance is just as big of an issue as people who do it intentionally, and it’s the one we can actually easily address because people who simply don’t know can learn, whereas those who can’t step outside their racist biases aren’t going to learn.Since there’s fewer resources in art education and in television of darker skintones being lit and exposed well, a lot of less experienced artists are going to be working mostly from imagination (or will lack the knowledge needed to interpret their refs!). I’m sorry that this is already a long thread, but lighting and skintones are a topic that we rarely do justice to when we’re just angry and accused/accusing. To start off, a bit on light itself - things in the light (even if their original local color is dark) will often be lighter than things in the shadow (even if their original local color is light). This is sometimes why folks get confused on if something is depicting darker skin well - if you sample from a brightly lit area in a screencap, and don’t depict the hues/values in the shadows correspondingly, you’re going to probably have lightened the appearance of the character’s overall skintone, even though the hue/value in the light isn’t off. Skintones have so much variation, so lets demonstrate this with flat planes that just have one color, so we can see how much what’s in light and what’s in shadow end up changed: the black shirt is now lighter than the white paper in places. These are flat, bland, simple colors, nothing like skin, and they’re already changed so much. But our eye can still tell what they’re meant to be, because we can see how bright the paper’s color is in the light and how much more relatively dark the shirt is in the shadow! (Image borrowed from http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2008/05/black-is-light-white-is-dark.html - everything on Mr Gurney’s blog is great reading for artists. Two other great resources courtesy of Mr Korwin, whose twitter threads are some of the few that I find informative for all skill levels - especially advanced artists. If you’re a beginner or intermediate artist, don’t be afraid to read and reread them a few times. If you’re still confused or don’t know how to apply it yet, give it some time, and keep thinking about them in relationship to how you work with light. It will come to you, and if you start thinking about these things now it’ll help you better understand things the more you learn, you’ll have solid fundamental knowledge instead of tricks and tips that apply in just a few areas like most guides for beginners).So, now that we know light can change values by a lot (but that they stay *~relative~* in the light and shadows, remember) I’m going to now borrow OP’s swatches. Swatches are great but you have to select them specific ways for them to be useful, and I think a lot of less-experienced artists struggle with skintones because they don’t understand how to compensate for where they’re selecting them from. Viv’s skintones in that image are really interesting (they look a bit warmer than in other places in the game), so interpreting them is necessary to using them well. (Obviously video games are trying to depict a stylized version of reality, so I’m not going to talk necessarily about what the engine is doing with the light, but rather the real principles of it from real life that it depicts) I could do this with all of them because for instance the Isabela one seems to be selecting at one point from an area lit by a secondary or ambient light? That’s going to throw you off a lot if you don’t use it in the same way, but Viv’s were the ones where I think I can show my point best.That super-bright highlight on her nose and a bit on the cheeks is a specular highlight ( https://twitter.com/devinkorwin/status/1232754407248420864 ). Darker skin tends to be more reflective, so don’t be afraid to use speculars more dramatically than on lighter skin, but be mindful that they are located typically where the face is more smooth or oily (nose is a big source of them) and that they are SMALL. If you’re putting a big dot there it’s going to look ridiculous, and if you’re making your overall highlights that color it’s going to depict the skintones very inaccurately and it’s going to diminish the beauty of the other colors.Next up is that very saturated tone on the cheek and nose. Noses and cheeks tend to have a warmer tone than the rest of the face, and midtones in general tend to have more saturation. Keeping midtones saturated eases transitions between colors, it makes skin look alive, and most importantly it tells the viewer the real value of the skin! In most lightly set-ups, midtones are going to show us the colors we think of as the true color of an object. If you work in a simpler style, this is a good starting place for flat colors (not… exactly this one, as I selected it at it’s most saturated, but a color AROUND this value is good - if you select around her face in the transition from light to shadow you’ll find that most of the midtones are close to this brightness value).What’re those other ones down there? They’re in the shadowed area, just a bit darker and less saturated than the midtone. Those are also pretty good shades to use if you’re looking to go with flatter colors. Those are pretty close to the ones OP picked out, you say? They sure are! But the reason I’m re-sampling stuff is to show you why if you’re looking to make the skintones read well with any style that uses more than two colors you may want to watch where you’re getting the colors from. Viv’s skin, with the ones OP sampled, wouldn’t have any vibrancy at all in warmer areas, which is why sometimes you can grab skintones and say “well it’s ACCURATE,” and yet, it isn’t quite.So, lastly, to put it all together - down at the bottom is OP’s swatches vs how I’d paint Viv’s skin in this lighting, and how the same swatches as OP has would turn out. It’s not to say that those aren’t correct, but depending on your style and lighting, they’re clearly a lot more limited in value and saturation range (which is going to make something look less like a focal area). They don’t have the band of warmer hues or the specular highlight, and the shadows are actually quite a bit lighter, because all of those selected tones are midtones and lighter shadows. They provide less information overall about the skin - which, depending on the simplicity of your style and your lighting - isn’t wrong! But in some styles or lighting set-ups, as you can see, it’s going to look a lot duller and flatter.But what about STYLE? What can folks who use lineart do to avoid the lines becoming only a bit darker than the darkest shadows on dark skin? I tend to go with two choices, myself - the first is to color the lines themselves in lit areas, so that they’re always only a bit darker than the areas under the lines. This makes the loss of contrast look more gradual. The other is to lean into it! Even in photographs you tend to lose a lot of information in the shadows (unless, like in the second guide up there you’re building all the contrast in your colors around the shadows)! Don’t be afraid to have a loss of contrast between your lines and the darkest shadows in the skin - if anything it should just remind you that putting sharp and broken-up detail in the shadows looks less like photographs and the eye see the world!Making darker skin ashy and washed out isn’t a good response to the problem, because it’s also going to diminish the beauty of darker skintones. We owe it to real people with skintones like this to depict characters that look like them well - and that doesn’t mean just picking darker tones than the white-washers and calling it a day, it means taking the time to learn how skin looks in light. Even tv shows and photographs of darker skin are often poorly lit and poorly exposed!With that in mind, it’s worth noting tv/film and video games that have received notice for lighting and exposing darker skin well have done so by using ways of selectively brightening it. Why is this good, instead of bad? Because the enemy here isn’t a nebulous “skin-lightening” effect, it’s depicting darker skintones poorly. In a darker scene, to depict darker skintones well, you’re going to have to use a contrast where you’re not losing essential information viewers need to see expressions and faces! While white-washing characters is linked with racist histories of media and cultures preferring light skin, on the other hand, there’s a very racist tradition of dropping all contrast on darker skin-tones and letting them look worse in media than lighter skin. Duplicating that effect in the name of “not white-washing” is also a terrible idea, and most guides on not white-washing totally ignore the problem! The trick is to light and expose with regard to the higher reflectivity that greater melanin provides skin! Is Miles “white-washed” here?  But why not? Because that band of midtones on the side of his face are providing us sufficient information for us as a viewerf to correctly guess what the “true” or local color of his skin is! The highlights don’t confuse us because the exact same highlights are present on his hair and costume!Just read some of the articles covering the lighting in HBO’s Insecure to see what I mean - https://petapixel.com/2017/09/14/look-hbos-insecure-lights-black-actors/ https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/sep/21/its-lit-how-film-finally-learned-how-to-light-black-skin - from the latter: “Lighting should be used to sculpt, rather than bleach, an actor’s skin, a technique championed by Charles Mills in Boyz N the Hood in his night-time exterior shots.”Okay, but again, most folks on tumblr work in a stylized use of color, so what does that mean for them? The thing about stylized art is that it’s about picking and choosing what you want to be there and what you don’t, what you want to exaggerate and what you want to diminish, so that’s up to you! Remember, the midtones carry the true color of the skin, so if you want to just use them? That’s fine, it will still be readable to the audience as a result. If you want to use midtones + highlights (and no shadows), try dropping your midtones down to being closer to where the shadows would be, and then use the highlights very sparingly or only to depict reflected light! If you want to use midtones + shadows, don’t be afraid to drop the shadows darker than OP had there, drop them into the darkest values you find on your ref, and move your midtones into more saturated tones to breathe a bit of that life back into the skin! More saturated tones sometimes look lighter, so don’t be afraid to use a shadow that’s as deep as your ref goes to enhance how viewers see the form and the skintones. Even though most artists these days start with stylized art, it is harder to do well than just copying what you see, so don’t be afraid to experiment, but don’t lose track of what is really there either. Darker skintones usually have a wider range of values on them than lighter ones, so selecting a couple that are very close will just flatten it out, and mimic the effects of bad photography. Don’t be afraid to look at the work of artists who you think handle it well and sample what they’re doing to figure out why it looks so great!So, to sum it all up - lighting is the most important thing in any depiction of color and value in art! But lighting is under your control, as an artist, and as a result it’s your responsibility to keep it consistent throughout the piece so that viewers can accurately see what you’ve depicted. Film, photography, and art have a long-standing history of doing a terrible fucking job with darker skin, and we owe it to real people with those skintones to depict them just as well as we do lighter tones - so if we have less experience and training on them, that means we need to step up our game there! A lot of artists also try to “correct” white-washing by making everything in the picture darker, too and that’s a mistake because then we’ll just read it as lighter skin in a darker scene! When you have a reference, be mindful of where you’re grabbing those tones from, and think about how they look overall.Depicting darker skin well isn’t just about going darker than white-washing, also, because making all dark skin dull and unreflective is fundamentally doing it a huge disservice too. -- source link

More pics about