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.
