#LIKE LITERALLY THE ACTORS SKIN IS PAINTED IN SHADES OF GREY

[imabiscuitinthousandworlds]

i'm going to he so fucking insufferae about theatre btw. just started my job at the theatre, with which i'm already obsessed bc their plays and stuff are just plain brilliant i could go on rants for hours and boy am i gonna know these plays by heart once i've sat through one half a dozen times. AND i joined a theatre class at school. with four other people but. i'm so incredibly motivated. i NEED. anyway it's tumblr y'all know i regularly go full obsessed nerd on things i am a Freak when it comes to these things and BOY is it gonna be Bad with the theatre

[lavenderek]

re: this post, it got way too long for the lighthearted thing the op said

so basically they're talking about fanartists who try to avoid whitewashing by making characters way too dark, and the carrot responded by pointing out that these are amateur artists and the tutorials are sometimes sarcastic.

i didn't start learning how to do human portraits until halfway through art college. they start you on still life of inanimate objects: you learn how to shade things in the third dimension. when we started on the human form, it was still that lesson. musculature, anatomy, shapes, etc.

a lot of fanartists that are like, 18 to 21 have not even started properly being taught how to choose colors for skin, if they're in art school.

(and skin is weird, honestly, it's harder than it looks. yeah, even in flat art with no shading. like, i'm not innocent, i have drawn beyoncé and accidentally made her grey. i'm certainly not a professional artist lmfao)

i've never forgotten something that happened in the teen wolf fandom years ago.

i don't remember who it was, but an artist drew a picture of the main character, who is of mexican descent. they were going off an actual photo of him. it was night, and he was depicted as lit by a bright moon. people felt he was too white, ganged up on them for whitewashing.

the artist responded with screenshots proving they used the dropper tool to copy the colors they used from a photo of the actor, that they had tried. it goes without saying that per the people calling them out, this was making excuses, proof they were racist, refusing to take criticism, etc. people coming to their defense were doing the same and tone policing. you know the drill.

so, ok. was ignoring or negative portrayal of the main character an issue in the fandom? yeah, honestly, it was. it's difficult to prove that was a result of racism across the board, since preferring sidekicks and villains to main characters happens in literally every fandom; but the trend can't and shouldn't be ignored.

was that particular post whitewashing? i didn't really think so! i think the colors they were using were a little desaturated, which made the entire piece look paler than it really was; if i recall correctly, this was emblematic of a lot of their art, regardless of the subject, so it was arguably just their art style.

("art style" often comes about from leaning into your strengths. i can't remember which artist it was, but i know of a genuine professional painter who always painted people in grassy fields, and it turns out it's because he was really bad at feet lmao.)

all of which i say because it was a lot of people piling on to a self-taught person insulting their art skills. what did this person take away from the experience? was it "practice how to use hue to indicate skin tone even under different lighting"? or was it "your art is racist, don't come back until you can pick skin tone right"?

and then people make fun of young artists for overcorrecting lmao. we punish them for not being good at art yet, and we punish them for trying to avoid being punished.

i don't know whether this artist got better at choosing skin tones, because i don't remember who they were. but i do know that a lot of young artists just avoided drawing scott, for fear they'd do it poorly. which resulted in less scott in fanart. which resulted in more nitpicking what scott fanart was posted, etc.

it was a cyclical issue.

is it "tone policing" to point out that when you're addressing an issue it matters how you do it? because i think it does matter. like, what's your goal when you're addressing it? is your goal to solve the problem or to draw out the literally inevitable human response of defensiveness and shame?

critique was another thing we learned in school, because "this is bad" is objectively unhelpful advice. "just use [actual art tip], it's not that hard" is unfortunately also bad critique. it's not about being nice or gentle, it's not about the "compliment sandwich," it's about guidance and whether or not you're the person to provide it.

anyway, op's post was Not That Deep, this is just something that's been bugging me lol