Admin Post: Drawing Challenge #14 - Ethnic Diversity

[goss]

Challenge #14: Ethnic Diversity

Create a drawing featuring someone of different ethnic background to your own.

You can even challenge yourself to portray an ethnicity that you've never attempted before. The comment section of this post may be used for discussion of the prompt (ie. ideas, suggestions, questions, etc.).

Please note that Alien-looking species (eg. Klingon) do not qualify for this particular challenge. Once your character has 100% human-looking features, they would qualify. Hope that clears things up. Please feel free to ask in the comment section if you're not sure.

A round-up post for submissions to this challenge will be done on Saturday 17th March, 2018.

Happy Drawing, everyone! :)

Comments

[goss]

Black Panther! \o/ I am definitely leaning towards drawing one of the characters from the movie. <3

[minoanmiss]

*cheers wildly*

[amberdreams]

That would be most ethnicities other than white... nice challenge, me likey!

[goss]

Huh. I just realised that I've probably never made fanart of anyone from my own ethnicity. :/ Must look into changing that...

Oh wait! I remember drawing that guy from Heroes - Mohinder! *phew* At least that's something.

[minoanmiss]

I know what you mean -- due to Societal Factors it's really easy to default in one's work. I've been trying to make a point of drawing other Black people, and this challenge inspires me to think of whom I haven't drawn and how to convey this information about my subjects. I'm so excited!

[goss]

(This discussion is so interesting to have with other artists, apologies for hijacking your comment thread, amberdreams.)

it's really easy to default in one's work

*nods*

Also, another factor is which fandoms you're really into. In the past, I was into Smallville, Merlin and Teen Wolf, where my favourite characters to draw were all white, so my fanart at that time didn't reflect much ethnic diversity.

Over the last year or so, I've been into shows like Avatar and Korra, and Marvel/DC movies, with more ethnically diverse characters that I love, so my faves to draw have also reflected that.

It's only when I had to figure out for the first time how to sketch features like Asian eyes or Black hair that I realised how limited my own artwork had been up to that point, since for myself as an Indian, the only thing that changed in terms of figuring out how to draw defining features was with the skin colouring.

-----

Somewhat related to the topic, I remember making a conscious effort to switch from creating all m/m fanart all the time, to including both male and female characters as subject matter, whether paired or by themselves. Nowadays it just comes naturally, but at the time, I had to make a conscious effort for inclusion of different genders in my own fanart. So to me, there's nothing wrong with making deliberate efforts at diversity, until eventually it becomes the norm.

[syntheid]

For me it's just weird because I'm mixed so I just. My particular mix doesn't show up that often in general media that I watch/ed (only one that's coming to mind is Skye/Daisy from SHIELD) and isn't always visually recognizable if it does. I have a couple OCs that are Chinese-European, though (specifically because I wanted to draw and write about people who were like me), so I actually have drawn my ethnicity a lot in that sense, but I think they often read as just white so it's a little... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But yeah I've consciously pushed to include diversity in both gender and race in my art since the norm does kind of get to you-- all the 'how to draw' tutorials tend to start from thin white people (and media is also largely that visual type) and it's difficult to break out of that unless you do it on purpose. I'm currently also working on body type diversity for that reason.

[goss]

I'm currently also working on body type diversity for that reason.

Yeah, I was thinking that we could do a series of diversity challenges, starting with ethnicity, and then continuing to portraying characters with different body types, ages, disabilities, etc.

[minoanmiss]

Oh AMEN. I. was just thinking that I should broaden the diversity of the people I draw...

[amberdreams]

I was racking my brain and found I've drawn Kevin Tran a couple of times, and Rufus Turner from SPN once... It's not a great record though! LOL

[mific]

Yay! This fits in really well with a project I have going at present!

[mekare]

Oh yay, what a fantastic prompt! I'll probably do something from Star Trek Discovery, there area lot of ethnicities I can choose from.