So I'm trying to make sure my comic is multi-cultural

[I_Write_Ivre]

So I color my comic and come up with the character designs in the first place. It irritates me that I at first ended up making most of the characters white when the comic is supposed to take place in a vast world with cultures inspired by real ones from the world over.

But I don't really know how to choose skin colors for characters. They ended up white because I figured I'd addressed skin color and never got around to it because I didn't know what to do. It's not like in ATLA where each color has one skin color and only one skin color. I never got around to choosing because the skin color didn't matter that much to the character.

And yet, I'm still irritated that I have a mainly white cast.

Is there some sort of random skintone generator or some pattern others use?

[Kaxen]

How much world-building have you done for your story-verse? You could probably decide on skin tones and your world's ethnic differences if you have decided on things like climate, history (like conquering forces moving in, trade hubs, tapped out aquifers prompting a mass exodus, etc.), lifestyles, technology level, and/or what on earth they think is "pretty" and a desirable trait, often because it's a status symbol proving a person is rich... like how paleness can be in style to prove one doesn't do outdoor work or how tanness can be in style to prove one has time to sunbathe and take exotic vacations to the Caribbean. Or I dunno. Everyone is horrified of vampires so dark skin is popular because vampires are lily-white bastards.


I hoard skintone color swatches in Photoshop. I think I saved them from a coloring guide long ago and I add new ones from time to time. Other times I just pick whatever from the color picker.

This guide to human types is probably worth a look: part 1, 2, 3. Since there's more to diversity than just skin tones.

[I_Write_Ivre]

Kaxen

How much world-building have you done for your story-verse? You could probably decide on skin tones and your world's ethnic differences if you have decided on things like climate, history (like conquering forces moving in, trade hubs, tapped out aquifers prompting a mass exodus, etc.), lifestyles, technology level, and/or what on earth they think is "pretty" and a desirable trait, often because it's a status symbol proving a person is rich... like how paleness can be in style to prove one doesn't do outdoor work or how tanness can be in style to prove one has time to sunbathe and take exotic vacations to the Caribbean. Or I dunno. Everyone is horrified of vampires so dark skin is popular because vampires are lily-white bastards.


I hoard skintone color swatches in Photoshop. I think I saved them from a coloring guide long ago and I add new ones from time to time. Other times I just pick whatever from the color picker.

This guide to human types is probably worth a look: part 1, 2, 3. Since there's more to diversity than just skin tones.

I've done a ton of world building, but this makes my problem worse what with racial mixing due to traders, immigration, emigration, disasters, and other racial mixing.

Several places have different ideas of beauty or status, but skin color isn't one of them.

[Kaxen]

I_Write_Ivre

I've done a ton of world building, but this makes my problem worse what with racial mixing due to traders, immigration, emigration, disasters, and other racial mixing.

Several places have different ideas of beauty or status, but skin color isn't one of them.

Is everyone okay with racial mixing in your universe? How long as this been going on? Are groups homogenized or still largely different? And mixing isn't always a 50/50 (or 25/25/25/25 or whatever) exchange anyway.

But if you're gonna keep saying skin color doesn't matter to anyone in the story and don't want an all-white cast, just go eeny-meeny-miny-moe and change their color palette because if you haven't any justification for them to be any particular color, you can make them any color you want randomly. I'm not really sure why that would be difficult.

[I_Write_Ivre]

Kaxen

Is everyone okay with racial mixing in your universe? How long as this been going on?

It's been going on for centuries, and few people have had any trouble with it as by the time they wanted to implement laws, there was so much mixing, there was would be no way to judge who had what genes anymore.

Kaxen

Are groups homogenized or still largely different? And mixing isn't always a 50/50 (or 25/25/25/25 or whatever) exchange anyway.

Inner city people are more homogenized than those closer to the city walls/borders, but you don't get neighborhoods where you don't see black people or white people. you can easily get the 25/25/25/25 mix and people barely care.

Kaxen

But if you're gonna keep saying skin color doesn't matter to anyone in the story and don't want an all-white cast, just go eeny-meeny-miny-moe and change their color palette because if you haven't any justification for them to be any particular color, you can make them any color you want randomly. I'm not really sure why that would be difficult.

My problem is making sure the choice is random enough. I'm thinking of keeping one of those crayola skintone pen sets as swatches and going down the set for coloring, but I don't have a better system of making sure it's random or mixed enough.

[Kaxen]

I_Write_Ivre

My problem is making sure the choice is random enough. I'm thinking of keeping one of those crayola skintone pen sets as swatches and going down the set for coloring, but I don't have a better system of making sure it's random or mixed enough.

As long as the skin tones of the characters don't have any unfortunate implications like all the dark skinned characters are all irredeemably evil, I don't think anyone would nit pick too hard if you don't have complete randomness.


But I guess you could number your color swatches and then use www.random.org for random number generation.




...or overthink really hard about dominant and recessive genetic traits and make a weighted probability table based on each character's lineage...

[I_Write_Ivre]

Kaxen

I_Write_Ivre

My problem is making sure the choice is random enough. I'm thinking of keeping one of those crayola skintone pen sets as swatches and going down the set for coloring, but I don't have a better system of making sure it's random or mixed enough.

As long as the skin tones of the characters don't have any unfortunate implications like all the dark skinned characters are all irredeemably evil, I don't think anyone would nit pick too hard if you don't have complete randomness.


But I guess you could number your color swatches and then use www.random.org for random number generation.




...or overthink really hard about dominant and recessive genetic traits and make a weighted probability table based on each character's lineage...

There's all skin colors on all sides when it comes to wars. I'll check out random.org; that might help me.

[slarn]

If it doesn't matter to the setting, just take some of the characters you've made and change their skin color or race at random. Write them exactly the same way you normally would have. You end up with a much more well-rounded cast if you think of them as characters first.

One of the worst things some entertainment does is try to fill a diversity quota only to end up with shallow stereotypes in the end.

[Kyousouka]

Agreeing with MPSai.

However, I think it would be more believable if certain ethnicities/backgrounds were more common in certain areas/factions than others, simply due to migration tending to follow spatial and temporal patterns rather than being completely random. You don't need to think through your world's entire history if it doesn't benefit the story and isn't fun for you, but I think it would be good to have different distributions in different places and groups.