If You Cant Draw Dark Skin Black Characters Your Art Is Shit - Tumblr Posts

a lot of people are whitewashing Oluwande from Our Flag means death and it’s racist

left are 3 reference images of Oluwande in different lighting conditions and different facial angles

right are screenshots of of people’s art with swatches and commentary added to them

I’ve cropped the screenshots to include much of the important information and to make the screenshots less recognizable but the prevalence of whitewashing here is extremely high, many of these are in the very top of the tags and have an upwards of 15k notes

major areas of whitewashing I’ve observed: lightening skin, wrong color highlights/blush (makes the skin look ashy and lighter, see below for more info), wrong hair texture, making the nose thinner, straightening and lengthening of the nose, giving the nose a pointed tip

several of the drawings are in bluish lighting which yes, does de-saturate darker skin tones to an extent (as seen in the middle photo left) but the drawings with blue lighting still have pink highlights/blush so no this is not “just the lighting”

lastly, a lot of art significantly changed his face shape as well as making him considerably thinner

artists do better and everyone else, call this out when you see it