Four or five times a day I hear students call out, “Ms.
Strauss, How do I make skin color?”
I have to patiently ask them to look again,
look harder, and be more descriptive… What color they are looking for? Then, I must convince them that they will need at least 4 or 5 variations of the
pigment to do the form justice…. Flesh tones are the hardest to match and they
vary under different artificial and natural lighting options. My students should cultivate a curious attitude when studying skin.
It is hard for them to believe that I don’t have the hues pre-packaged
like everything else in their lives. It seems like only yesterday, during the
civil rights movement, that Crayola changed their “flesh” colored crayon’s name
to “peach”. When did they remove their “Indian red” crayon from the market? No.
Now we have to work more and look harder.
We can be afraid of what we do not know and that goes for
mixing skin tones as well as for welcoming peoples from different regions of
the world with varying pigments in their skin tone.
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