A Couple Snippets From A Presentation I Gave At School This Past Week On Storyboarding!!

a couple snippets from a presentation i gave at school this past week on storyboarding!!

‼️DISCLAIMER: I am a still a student and have only worked on student and indie projects! This is just stuff that I personally find helpful as an amateur, so feel free to take it with a grain of salt!

Happy boarding, friends! ✍️💕

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 don’t 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

So you might be saying: Lion why a guide on drawing black people? Well young blood it’s because a lot of people cant…seem…to draw…black people..Amazing I know. 

Racist (caricatures) portrayals of black people have been around forever, and to this day people can’t seem to draw black people like they are human. If your artwork resembles any of the above even remotely your artwork is racist and offensive. If you try to excuse that as a stylistic choice you’re not only a terrible artist, but racist too!!! Congrats.

Whitewashing is also a problem. A lot of people refuse to draw black features on canonly black characters. While this example isn’t colored, lightening the skin-tone of a character is also considered whitewashing. So lets start with features!

Now all black people have different noses thats a no-brainer, but black noses tend to have flatter bridges, and wider nostrils. Please stay from triangular anime noses and small button noses. Your drawings should not depict black people with abnormally large noses. (Especially if you do not draw other characters this way)

If you feel like the way you draw lips on black characters is offensive or resembles a caricature,it probably does and you should change it. ABSOLUTELY AVOID PLACING LIPS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE FACE. 

Hair is so diverse! Please get used to drawing braids, locs,kinks and coils! If you can learn to draw ringlets and long waves you can learn how to draw black hairstyles.

Add clips! Learn how to draw baby-hairs and never be afraid to add color Pinterest and Google are free my dudes! Also try using square brushes for blocking in coils.

OK THAT’S ALL YOU GUYS

This is suuuper bare bones but this is basically how I make space. The great thing about space is that there’s really no right or wrong way to go about it- depending on the style- just pepper in some stars / as little or as much color as you want and BLAM- space also to note (cos I’m silly and forgot to add):

step 1 is base layer

step 2-5 is all one layer

step 6-7 in one layer

step 8 is one (optional) layer

(also layer effects and references are your friend.)

(also also the other brush I used was the Uneven layering brush right above the one I have circled) I hope this helps!

Wings anyone?