Digital Art Dark Skin Palette

Anonymous asked:

hi i'm an artist and i do pastel art. how do you color dark skinned characters in pastel art without whitewashing them?

afro-ami answered:

i get asked this a lot by many artists and i totally get it

The first thing to note down is that coloring dark skinned in a pastel way is NOT about lighting their skin but rather about lowering the saturation in their skin tone.

what i mean by this is to focus less on skin tone and more of how piercing the color is. pastel are is soft and carries a fragile color scheme. many artists who don't know how to color dark skin usually make the mistake of coloring their characters like this:

DO NOT DO THIS^^

artists coloring dark skin like this in pastel art is the primary reason why the myth of "you can't color dark skin in pastel art" still lies around. The problem with these color scheme above is that this happens due to the artist focusing on the fact that dark skin is brown rather than trying to put effort into getting the skin tone to fit the color scheme. The color in these drawing have skin tones that down match the scheme at all and stands out too much hence the easy way out to this problem for these artist is

W H I T E W A S H I N G ~

PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS WHEN DRAWING A DARK SKINNED CHARACTER!!!

Rather than whitewashing them, the solution to this problem is to lower the saturation of the skin tone to fit the scheme

GO FROM THIS:

TO THIS:

^This fits the scheme so much more better because there character is clearly brown without their skintone being saturated to the point of hurting your eyes

M o r e E x a m p l e s ~

from the colors i used on the skin tone of these two pieces the colors are around the same range of darkness

The only difference is that one is more saturated than another

Welp those are all my tips for coloring darkskin for pastel art
hope this was helpful :'0

I don't get these examples at all

Like yeah the color could be different but it wasnt so wildly off

And the Lance and Hamilton examples? Where clearly using a tranparent brush. Like at least use decent examples

Because I don't disagree that whitewashing os a problem, but you could make people real self conscious about making fucking art

Also forgetting to mention people woth darker skin tones have areas where their skin gradiates into a lighter tone, sometimes very light such as people from latino and african american decent

These areas include the palm on their hands(including back of fingers), under the feet, and sometimes underarm (i have that but its probably a tan). I don't know any other areas but it's important not to make the skin look just plain brown, but add the undertone

Ex.

"the color could be different but it wasnt so wildly off"

umm, the colors were wildly off with the examples that i used

you're forgetting the fact that this is pastel art. in pastel art the colors that are used when applied are under a setting where the colors agree with each other

the piece carries a bright pink/lavender theme of colors. the issue with the piece on the left is that the character's skin tone completely contradicts the theme. it's out of place, and way to saturated than all of the colors in that piece.

"Where clearly using a tranparent brush. Like at least use decent examples"

You did almost have a good point with the transparent brushes but with further thinking your point falls flat. Transparent brushes isn't an excuse for whitewashing. the problem with your point is that you associate transparency = lighter, which is true to come extent but not in the way you interpret it in.

you're point is that the artist was coloring their black character with a transparent brown color. When you color transparently with the color brown, it doesn't get lighter, it gets more dull. The saturation in the color decreases, which literally goes with my point on my original post. "lower the saturation of a character's skin tone when doing pastel art"

like for example^ these are the same color but one is transparent. notice how the transparent color is just less saturated

"Because I don't disagree that whitewashing os a problem, but you could make people real self conscious about making fucking art"

Ummm….yikes

giving a tutorial on how to color dark skin in pastel art without whitewashing shouldn't result into an artist feeling self conscious about their art.

whitewashing does more self esteem damage to dark skin people than it does to call it out an bring out awareness on how to fix it~

" Also forgetting to mention people woth darker skin tones have areas where their skin gradiates into a lighter tone, sometimes very light such as people from latino and african american decent "

That doesn't really change anything about my point like……at all

that also wasn't a convenient time to point that out considering that in all of my art, i make my character's palm lighter.

like in these pieces:

the reason why i did not do this for my example is because these are simply just examples, my primary focus is dark skin tone