NO BUT HOW ABOUT WE GIVE ACTUALLY HELPFUL ADVICE/CRITIQUE WHEN SOMEONE’S FAN ART OF A CHARACTER SEEMS “WHITEWASHED” INSTEAD OF SHITTING ON IT AND TRYING TO MAKE THE ARTIST OUT TO BE AWFUL AND RACIST
BECAUSE THE LATTER DOESN’T HELP THE ARTIST DEVELOP THEIR SKILLS IN BETTER REPRESENTING DARKER-SKINNED CHARACTERS IT JUST MAKES THEM SCARED TO POST THEIR ART AT ALL
I wanna add on to this by saying I am scared to draw POC characters.
There’s no real tutorials on different features, and when I find a reference I’m terrified that I’m going to make them look too stereotypical.
Even trying to do the color work for my dad’s skin (dark Latino) makes me nervous because 1) there’s very little information on how to make the skin tone look like something other than burnt Sienna orange, and 2) at what point does a race study look offensive?
I wanted to make a villain in an old RP dark skinned, but I was afraid that making a Villain dark would be racist.
As someone who draws and paints digitally, I NEED this feed back. I’m not trying to be offensive, and I’m not going to argue with constructive criticism , so please, PLEASE, offer advice to people on drawing PoC because there is a horrible lack of instruction out there.
HELLO FRIENDS! A buddy of mind directed me to this post.
As someone who has lived with this same fear I want you to know that it’s normal for a lot of folks. I actually had this fear before Tumblr. It’s not something that sprung up from the internet only.
Steven Universe is actually the show that opened me up more to different ways of expressing a characters race presentation (I was still a bit timid about it before) and I’m very, very, very grateful for that. It’s also how I ended up drawing this little cutie:
Now, moving along, let me hand ya’ll some tutorials to see if they’ll help you out a bit.
Also mulattafury covers a really, really good aspect of this in this ask here. Remember that you’re drawing a person and people come in a wide, wide variety of forms, colors, shapes and sizes. There is no cookie cutter mold for race. The recent Blackout days are amazing proof of this. Look at the variety! Appreciate how beautiful human beings are!
Want more “real” people instead of celebrities or models to work from? OH MAN DO I HAVE THE TUMBLR BLOG FOR YOU. Now on first loading it as of right now you will see a lot of pale folks. Scroll down though. You’ll see more variety as you go through. See?
Also please remember that darker skinned folks can have lighter eyes! And that not all people that ID as a race that you would normally think of as having darker skin have dark skin. Remember, variety is endless!
There are so, so, so many resources out there! It just takes a bit of digging to find them.
Can I guarantee that you will NEVER be called racist for drawing people that are not white? No. But generally? You’re going to be called out as racist more if you only draw people that are white.
Something interesting to me is that folks that told me that my work could be seen as racist in the past? Were all white people. And I’m not even talking about drawing racial stereotypes. I’m talking about just having a dark skinned character. For some reason, the mere act of drawing someone who was not white seemed to make them think that it was racist. I had a customer give me a blank slate for drawing characters once. One of them was black. They asked me to change it to “avoid the race issue”. Which…isn’t how that works.
Try things. Practice. Draw stuff. And hell, put in a disclaimer, make a note, tell people “I am still learning, if something seems off please tell me! I’ll work to fix it!” If you tell people that you’re trying? They’re generally more than happy to help and will understand that it’s not intentional.
Focus on drawing people, not race. Focus on how this models lip does that thing or how their nose curves just so. Think about how you can simplify and apply it. Generally you’re not going to end up with gross racial caricatures. You know why? Because most gross racial caricatures? Don’t even look like real people. Let’s look at Looney Tunes for a sec:
I showed this to one of my friends who is younger and she said “Is that supposed to be a person?” Racist caricatures really blow shit way horribly out of proportion.
When it comes to the white washing aspect? I have two big suggestions to avoid that.1) COLOR CHECK. If you are drawing someone or you are drawing a character and they are dark skinned? Check multiple image sources for the character to make sure you have the skin tone correct. That’s all you gotta do. Make sure it’s the right color. If you’re working from a real person’s photo I suggest choosing a mid tone from their face to start with. Also keep your reference image handy. 2) If you’re doing a character yourself? Consider how dark you would like this character to be. Have you tried making a darker skinned character? Why not? Try it out and see how it goes. (I’m not saying that you HAVE to make dark skinned characters but consider it in your process. You have a whole box of crayons to color with, why do you keep using the same one?) Also if you make characters treat them like people, not stereotypes.
That’s pretty much all I got on the matter. Remember, if you fuck up sometimes? That’s okay. It’s how you react that defines you. There was a really, really popular artist (shoomlah here on tumblr) who was doing historically accurate Disney princesses awhile back that misrepresented Pocahontas. Folks called her out on it and she acknowledged she made a mistake and she actually redid the piece, getting help from folks in the know to make it more accurate. Here are the original and more accurate versions. She’s stated that this incident made her a more thoughtful artist.
So there you go! Refs, tuts, thoughts, and advice! Enjoy!
Ran this by one of my buddies, captain-naro and he added this:
“I’ve noticed that drawing POC is something that is going against the norm a little bit. And it seems to be less normal to have a POC existing in an art piece than it is to have a POC existing in the world. When there are many.”
“It only becomes a race issue when you portray them in a way that sparks a race issue”
“Honestly what it seems like to me is. Everyone has an ideal look for their character whether it is because they want that character to look the most attractive or whatever and that ideal is usually a white person.Thanks to Tumblr and progression being a thing it is not as bad as it was but it still is there and blatant to me. To most people, white people are the most appealing thing to draw for a protagonist or anything like that whereas a black character would fill the role of a background character or an enemy and pretty much any other race would be some other kind of “exotic” trope or something. But that’s probably going more into story writing and not art.”
Going to share this over here as well because I wrote up a huge advice and resource thing in it and maybe some of my followers here can use it too.
