Blackopal888 - Opalized

Long time no see Tumblr. Quick guide on coloring deeper skin tones

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

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 arthope this was helpful :’0

quick guide to my throughts behind drawing na’vi faces

tHEEEEEEEEEEEEM