OkayâŠso if you know me you know that whitewashing is a HUGE pet peeve of mine. And normally Iâd be all up on this post screaming âYES, THIS!â  Because I agree with a lot of points in this, mostly the â Do not take swatches from the lightest part of the face - all the light colours shown here are meant for highlighting purposes. â  howeverâŠitâs not this cut and dry. I want to make it perfectly clear that I agree with the majority of this post and while Iâm 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 havenât put a lot of study into it. Color theory takes a long time to learn and most fan artists havenât spent that kind of time trying to master it. Hell, even most professionals canât do it perfectly. Most arenât intentionally whitewashing. In fact, most are probably swatching from game stills to make sure they donât 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 doesnât realize this is happening they donât realize the color has changed so they donât 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 canât handle that kind of light. Mine is turned down therefore sometimes when I paint things look TOO dark when in reality theyâre 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 theyâd shift a little more than this because xna lara is terrible at lighting) The âflat neutralâ 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. Â 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 Iâm 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.Â
This is a problem because when finding references we think âWhich screen should I should I try to match? Well, letâs say my lighting is similar to the second picture. Okay, great, I have my reference and Iâve swatched and compensated for the discrepancy. Fantastic, but WAIT, I still get called out because heâs not as dark as he is in 3 or 4 even though he wouldnât be because my lighting isnât neutral or dark, and the ambient color is different. I think âwell fuck, I did the best I could and I matched my reference.â But the person criticizing thinks âheâs darker than that so you didnât make him dark enoughâ and while, yes, that point is valid, itâs also not applicable in this particular situation.So you do another picture, this time in darker lighting, replicated picture number 3. Another person says âheâs more the color of number 4, you made him too light and too red.â Eventually you just donât 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, isnât it? Thatâs not progress.
In closingâŠwhile Iâm sure there are some people out there intentionally whitewashing and they SHOULD be fucking called out for it because I canât 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 itâs better to mix colors yourself,but can I reiterate again that SKINTONES ARE FUCKING HARD AS A BOG FISHERâS BALLS!  Most of those artists are already kicking themselves because they donât 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 donât even know it well and Iâve been doing it for more than 10 years) itâs unrealistic to expect a set of swatches to have much effect when color and light come into play.Â
EDUCATION goes farther than CRITICISM. Please, if you have a problem with the way an artist is painting skintones educate them, donât just assume theyâre purposefully whitewashing unless you know for a fact theyâre a complete bigoty douche. I realize Iâll probably get a lot of hate for this, butâŠas an artist I canât get behind âlighting doesnât actually change anythingâ 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.