HEY YOU. YOU WITH THE HETALIA OC

Let me just smack all guilty parties with this journal of mine:

And you better read through that journal if you don't understand what I'm talking about, you silly spud.

Now let me just emphasize a thing.

now, my point is: I don't care what form of media you are using. I don't care how talented you are as an artist. That doesn't mean you should deliberately whitewash characters that shouldn't be whitewashed just because you are too lazy to toggle your colour picker on your art program or you are too lazy to adjust the colours of your traditional media. Of course it takes practise with traditional media to get the right colours, but that doesn't mean you should make lazy cop outs like that.

After all, if you're going to make lazy excuses when it comes to your own OCs, then sorry, maybe you don't give a flying fuck about your OCs as much as you think you do. Because when it comes to APH OCs, you are representing actual places that also in turn represent real people from these places. So yeah, start giving a fuck about how you portray them in both personality and appearance.

By the way, colouring tans can actually be way easier than colouring pale characters at least for me. At least you can actually see the colour appear on your screen and stuff. Pale skin is tougher imo. 8I And if you go too pale with the colouring, the character could start looking more like a hospital patient. Just saying. In any case, if you actually thought about it, colouring darker skin is the same as colouring lighter skin. It's just about choosing your colour and going with it. Go darker with shading, do your highlights, all that toning stuff, tadah. There's nothing that different about it.

So claiming that you don't know how to colour darker skin when you can colour pale skin is actually a very absurd claim.

And read the above journal if you haven't already, because it tackles the issue in much further depth. Don't make Helpful Hannah think you're a little shit. Don't be lazy like Mister Joe.

SO YEAH TAKE MY ADVICE ON BOARD, DON'T MAKE EXCUSES FOR NOT GIVING YOUR CHARACTERS TANS OR DARK SKIN WHEN THEY REPRESENT PLACES THAT SHOULDN'T BE SO PALE