i drew a bunch of elves of color!!
This post reminds me of something that happened a few years back.
I once served as art director for a project where the illustration spec called for characters of a variety of races (in the real-world sense, not the Dungeons & Dragons sense - though the latter was involved as well).We had one particular artist, tasked with drawing a series of elves, who didn’t quite seem to get what that meant. Their output was basically “white elf”, “another white elf”, “white elf with a tan”, “white elf looking a bit pale”, “yet another white elf”, etc.
When this was pointed out, they were like “oh, yeah, now I get it - I’ll totally fix that with my next piece”.
They proceeded to turn in a picture of a blue elf.
In the end, we had to provide specific quotas for specific levels of racial representation in order to get the point across. It all worked out in the end, but it’s stuck with me ever since that this artist examined the original spec, looked at our feedback, and came to the conclusion a blue elf was more plausible than a black one.In conclusion: this is awesome.
Read that last paragraph as many times as you need to.