#just try to be patient. i’ve got a meager pinterest board of better references and a supportive spouse helping me scout

[webgeekist]

Hi, please don't be hurt by this comment, but in the future, please be mindful of illustrating white features on your fan art of people of color. There are so few characters that we (POC) can call our own, so it kinda stabs when we see fan creators whitewash our representation. Thank you for reading.

Yeah. Let me have this conversation, because the literal post I made after that portrait of Asami that most likely prompted this comment was a tags-only frustration post about how I actually tried to back that way off and really failed at it. There’s a strong Megan Fox vibe there that just stubbornly refused to go away, and as much as I really don’t think Asami Sato would look like Megan Fox in real life, I also didn’t completely hate the final product.

I apologize if that failure hurt you personally, anon. That was not my intention with it.

There’s a practice element to that kind of work that I just don’t have under my belt for a lot of ethnicities. Part of it is familiarity (I live with a south Asian, and her features are very different from my target here, and though I’ve got my own mixed heritage my family is pretty disgustingly white). Part of it is past interests. My past portrait subjects have been pretty monochromatic in that regard, and honestly not that complicated. There’s no room for interpretation for how much deviation from a base is enough when the character you’re trying to draw is physically portrayed by someone. That’s easy. Conjuring features, either from a series of models or from some base face and then making subtle and increasing alterations for ethnicity? Hard. At least, for me, a hobbyist artist with limited time and divided attentions.

I’m not going to pretend that starting at “classic Hollywood,” having read that line in the season 1 art book comments, and moving from there wasn’t a mistake, but I did. I went looking for Asami’s nose and lips in a finite catalog of potential starlets because I knew that WAS a starting point for her character, and made that my base. That was my first mistake, and one I immediately acknowledged. But torn between actually liking the product and realizing I didn’t do enough to it (and constrained in this program on this device/program to a finite number of layers, which drives me nuts in portrait work as it turns out), I called the experiment complete, and posted it.

It’s an attempt, and part of the struggle I’m going to continue with is that an animated character’s features are fairly simple compared to that of an actual human being, and one of the reasons I want to keep trying is there’s not a lot of portrait work out there that I see and think, “oh, that’s Asami.” (I definitely get Korra more in what I’ve seen, but even with her there’s one feature I’ll debate you over because it’s so important to recognition and that’s very likely the least Asian feature on Asami’s face, as well). What I’ve seen is highly interpretive by virtue of the source material being iffy, probably (and definitely more skillfully) representative of at least one of the cultures Asami or Korra’s heritages are based on, but often not terribly reminiscent of the original concept, to me. That’s fine. Fanart is interpretive, evolutionary, and personal, and these are the kinds of representation most often (and rightfully) criticized in LoK. That art needs to be made.

Some of us are just not very good at bridging that gap at this particular point in our art careers. I’m aware, and I’m trying. There will hopefully be better attempts to come. I like to think of my work as something that evolves.

But I’m four years out of practice with portraits. That’s the first thing I’ve started AND finished since 2016, and I’m proud of that accomplishment. I’m not going to hide my art away because it’s not perfect, and I’d be horrified if anyone thought that was necessary because their first or second or fifteenth or two hundredth attempt wasn’t perfectly representative of the character they’re trying to portray. I understand the concern that drove you to this comment, and encourage you to very gently nudge artists toward accepting the criticisms as a point of necessary improvement. I also ask that you have some degree of patience with people. Improving one’s art is a matter of practice, and muses are fickle creatures. I’m old enough and mature enough to understand that, and take criticism. Just be gentle with others who might not be.