Creating basic character information boxes for all species.

Jotun should have "tail colour" not "fur colour".

Jætte_Troll wrote:

Jotun should have "tail colour" not "fur colour".

Is the tail the only spot on a Jotun that has fur?

Sean Okotami wrote:

*slaps you* How dare you did not make a box for the Centaurs and Sphinxes? Come on, they're the two most underused races in the whole world.

As I explained earlier, I only made information boxes for races that had characters in the wiki. Centaurs and Sphinxes did not at that time (and perhaps still do not?) have any characters in the wiki.

I'm a little confused about some skin colors, mainly because Wikipedia and Google Image doesn't help. I don't know if Pale means something like albinism or lacks melanin in the skin tone; if Pale Pinkish means something like paler than a Fair-skinned, but not as pale as a... well, Pale-skinned; or if Milky White literally means white or close to white skin. I suggest that for the more "Human" skin colors, it should be put in order from palest to darkest, while for more exotic colors, such as blue, red or green, put Light or Dark to adjust the tone.

Something like this: Milky white, pale, pale pinkish, fair, light tan, tan, brown, chocolate, mocha, dark.

Sean Okotami wrote:

I'm a little confused about some skin colors, mainly because Wikipedia and Google Image doesn't help. I don't know if Pale means something like albinism or lacks melanin in the skin tone; if Pale Pinkish means something like paler than a Fair-skinned, but not as pale as a... well, Pale-skinned; or if Milky White literally means white or close to white skin. I suggest that for the more "Human" skin colors, it should be put in order from palest to darkest, while for more exotic colors, such as blue, red or green, put Light or Dark to adjust the tone.

Something like this: Milky white, pale, pale pinkish, fair, light tan, tan, brown, chocolate, mocha, dark.

We had a small discussion about skin color a few pages back, and I kind of just took the suggested colors and stuck them in a sentence together, not caring much about the order. I also disagree with some of your ordering, but I think I want to hear what other people think about this idea first, and what order they would put the colors in.

Oldman40k2003 wrote:

Sean Okotami wrote:

I'm a little confused about some skin colors, mainly because Wikipedia and Google Image doesn't help. I don't know if Pale means something like albinism or lacks melanin in the skin tone; if Pale Pinkish means something like paler than a Fair-skinned, but not as pale as a... well, Pale-skinned; or if Milky White literally means white or close to white skin. I suggest that for the more "Human" skin colors, it should be put in order from palest to darkest, while for more exotic colors, such as blue, red or green, put Light or Dark to adjust the tone.

Something like this: Milky white, pale, pale pinkish, fair, light tan, tan, brown, chocolate, mocha, dark.

We had a small discussion about skin color a few pages back, and I kind of just took the suggested colors and stuck them in a sentence together, not caring much about the order. I also disagree with some of your ordering, but I think I want to hear what other people think about this idea first, and what order they would put the colors in.

Well, it was by looking back that I had to address that we put the skin in order of tone.

we need to solve that question once and for all I think ^^;
too much question mark on the boxes in the wiki.

Let's take Crisis for example. Her skin would be "fair" according to that list ?

Yes, I'd say she has fair skin. A little less tan then other characters, but she isn't a ghost by any means.

Here's a concept skin colour range I made.
Obviously it doesn't cover everything that's possible, but I think we could place some of the colours Sean described along it.

Anime-Junkie wrote:

Here's a concept skin colour range I made.
Obviously it doesn't cover everything that's possible, but I think we could place some of the colours Sean described along it.

No offense, but just a picture and no caption doesn't exactly help. For instance, which shade is Mocha? Which shade of Chocolate? Etc.

Sean Okotami wrote:

Anime-Junkie wrote:

Here's a concept skin colour range I made.
Obviously it doesn't cover everything that's possible, but I think we could place some of the colours Sean described along it.

No offense, but just a picture and no caption doesn't exactly help. For instance, which shade is Mocha? Which shade of Chocolate? Etc.

The one that makes you want to bite, of course.

Divided the range into colour box and describe it: box A - white, box B - fair, box C - tan... Wonder if it help?

That too.

Sean Okotami wrote:

Anime-Junkie wrote:

Here's a concept skin colour range I made.
Obviously it doesn't cover everything that's possible, but I think we could place some of the colours Sean described along it.

No offense, but just a picture and no caption doesn't exactly help. For instance, which shade is Mocha? Which shade of Chocolate? Etc.

I don't know. I assumed that Mocha (as you listed as darkest) is the darklest there, and Milky white is the other end.

Anyway I found this. It's the Felix von Luschan Skin Colour Chart. it's not exact, but it is a reasonable guide. (source)

An accompanying quote:
"Europeans are typically lighter than 15, and lighter than 12 in Northern Europe. Africans, with absolutely no non-African admixture can be as light as 20, or as dark as the scale gets at 36."

Again, it doesn't tell me which range is Milky White, which range is Pale, which range is Pale Pinkish, which range is Fair, etc. Unless it says so, you can just assume and get the entirely wrong skin tone. And why is 17 darker than 18? Again, I say we just decide on an order for the skin tone term from palest to darkest. Just a chart with nothing saying "This is Pale, this is Caucasian, this is Chocolate, this is Light tan" is not a big help.

There are a couple of major problems with assigning names to colors. The first one is that there are no absolutely true names for colors, and exactly how wide of a range of values constitute the same color also varies. Even worse, the color space we have to use in order to get a strict semi-unique color definition on a computer is the sVGA color space, which is a device dependent color space and thus not universal (meaning that my "Pure Green" might very well look different than your "Pure Green", even though both are defined as RGB(0,255,0)). Finally it does not seem to be possible to place all the colors that a human's skin can be on a color-line. which means that if we want to be complete we have to move to a 2d or 3d surface (which may or may not have duplicate regions of color), or just accept that we will miss some colors.


However, even with all of those potential drawbacks we can still do an approximation, like so (spoilered for size) :

Spoiler:

I am missing some colors (fair, swarthy, dark) because I couldn't find any RGB values for them. The actual color is on the right in the "dots", but they are placed over the region on the left that they come closest to matching (according to GIMPs "select by color" tool)

Really I think that we are working backwards. I think that we should first find a nice palette of skin tones (maybe on Deviant Art?) that have names attached to the colors, and then place those names on this line. Assuming there are no missing spots on the line, we can then just use those names as the names for skin colors.

(Some of the color sources I used)
http://web.njit.edu/~kevin/rgb.txt.html
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colornames.asp
http://www.tayloredmktg.com/rgb/

How can pale be... well, paler than milky white? Also, I was just pointing out that a simple graphic with no annotation for explanation is useless. All I'm suggesting is an order from palest to darkest for the more humanish skin tones. For exotic colors like red green or blue, just slap light or dark to give an approximation of the tone. Why is that so hard to understand? Also, wouldn't fair be between pale pinkish and light tan? Personally, I see Dark as pointless. I mean, what does "dark" means as a skin color? A skin tone, maybe, like a dark tan, but not as a general color. Also, swarthy basically means just dark-skinned, so I guess that would be our equivalent to black people.

Sean Okotami wrote:

How can pale be... well, paler than milky white?

And here lies the problem with naming colours like this.
People perceive the colour for a name differently, (as is illustrated above).

Well, I suppose we could just SHOW the skin color in the skin colour field, with a name next to it.

For example:
Skin colour: █ (Fair)
or
Skin colour: █ (Black)
or even
Skin colour: █ (Mermaid?)

There's no reason that we couldn't do this for every color field either.

No, I say more for the ones a real human can have. And why not put them only in names? I still go by Milky White, Pale, Pale Pinkish, Fair, Light Tan, Tan, Swarthy (since it means dark-skinned), and the rest, you figure out.

Is a good idea. It can help us at time in which we create our characters.

We wouldn't be able to name them all though, there's too many, and we'd have to make a range as to what that color encompasses. For me, Pale, and Milky White are so close to each other already I just call them both "Pale" anyway.

Also, tan for oldman isn't tan for me. that level of "tan" is just about my own skin tone, and my tan (when I dont burn, which I usually do) is of course darker than that.

My range goes: Pale, Pink, Pale-Pink, Yellow, Pale Yellow, Pale/Light Brown, Brown, Dark Brown, or something like that. Also, for the most part, that's what a lot of deviants go by.

Juts in case anyone's not looking at the dates before posting, this thread has been inactive for almost two years...

yeah I saw, but if a post is relevant, then it doesn't really matter.

Would it be possible to move or copy this thread to the Character Discussions thread? It seems like it'd fit better there, making it easier to find and get to on short notice.

Well, we don't copy threads, and it's actually quite appropriate to the "ideas" thread still... Have you tried putting it in your browser favourites?

I suppose that'd be a good alternative that I for some reason didn't think of myself. Alright.