Welcome to the party

Fix your hearts or die.

You know how many of us joke that Pride month should be followed by Wrath? Well, this year I feel a deep, burning fury towards all who use transgender lives as political propaganda, bargaining chip or something to be debated and decided on without any of us in the room.

We are human beings. You cannot erase us.

(you do not have to follow the beliefs associated with the style if that style has associated beliefs. The wheel curse does not affect anything like that.)

I'm not sure how much knowledge you have on colour theory, but what would you suggest people do to make a pastel colored drawing without lightening a Black character's skin tone?

Hopefully, I explained this well

Use more layers, if you must. Duplicate the layers of brown until it looks strong enough (IDC if it "looks less soft"- check that!)

Use an undertone to strengthen the presence of the base color on top. Oranges and deep reds go well under brown skin.

Instead, imo, the artist needs to adjust the way they pick pastel colours across the drawing, both the skin tones (CBC's advice on that is accurate!) and the background.

It's a shame it is so widespread for people to think they can't make it work, because the value contrast makes it much easier to emphasise the characters as the focal point (and treating the composition based on the fact that the character's skin tone is the darkest colours in the image). so things that artists can do to design pastel palettes for art with dark skinned characters:

Increase the saturation of the background pastel hues. Pink will still read as pastel for a very large range of saturations. Those more saturated shades will complement dark skin tones.

Using CBC's advice of overlays can bring the skin undertones closer to the background hues too. If the art piece is primarily pink, reddish undertones help harmonise the colours.

Some brief spots of darker colours in the background will balance the contrast in the artwork—doesn't have to be the whole image, even just an object or a background element.

One of my favourite Tumblr artists who does a lot of pastel palettes with dark-skinned characters is pianta, https://pianta.tumblr.com (artist is Black btw). Like look at this:

(Original post: https://pianta.tumblr.com/post/795066682439794688/pianta-youre-the-last-thing-i-wanna-lose)

I think this piece is amazing in demonstrating all of those techniques—saturated pink skin undertones, higher saturation of pink and green hues in the background, dark areas in the background (bushes) counterbalancing the characters' darker skin tones. And how the value contrast draws the eye to the main focus of the image, the characters' faces.

Imagine for a second you are Adrian surname The Eridian. Your spouse has been missing and presumed dead for around a decade, and suddenly one day an alien spaceship comes into orbit. And you cheer "Yay alien species have realized we have the same problem and have come to either give us a solution or join or efforts, too bad my mate is still gone."

Except he is not actually gone, because the eridian equivalent of a carebear decided to save them. And he doesn't want anything in return, in fact he is well aware that he might die A PAINFUL SLOW DEATH, shortly after fighting just to get the love of your life back to you. But it's ok :) because Rocky (yes he gave them a silly name) is my best friend! Oh- Are you ok-

someone on reddit explained 😭