If you have really dark skinned characters, how do you keep their features from being washed out

There's a lot of good advice in this thread, but I don't think anyone's addressed the most obvious issue: I'm sorry, but that skin color is just too dark for its context. =/ There's no way around it.

Like everything else in art, color is a representation of a concept. Never have I ever seen someone with such dark skin that their facial features are indistinguishable...so by giving a character a skin color that's so dark you can barely see their face, you are not actually representing anyone. On the contrary, it looks lazy; like your only concept of dark skin is that it should be "dark"...meanwhile, making sure that it still looks like skin and not just a void doesn't factor into your thinking.

Now in a different context, like a different art style with a greater level of detail, that color might work. For example, in the Houseki no Kuni manga, there is a (non-human) character whose skin is straight-up black, and they still look beautiful and have readable expressions, thanks to the artist's skillful use of white highlights and linework.
But if you're not using highlights, or shading, or color grading, or any kind of detailed technique that will bring life to an extremely/unrealistically dark color-- and it seems like you aren't-- the unfortunate truth is that you simply cannot get away with it. It's gonna look confusing at best and like an offensive caricature at worst; you need to use a different color.

The new color you should pick depends on the skintone aspect that you want to emphasize for the character. For example, if the darkness of the skin is the most important aspect, you want a very dark and desaturated brown-- notice how I said dark AND desaturated, not just dark.
Taking saturation away will help the skintone "feel" darker while still being readable, and in my experience it's more realistic anyway. Never have I ever seen a real person with that eye-blindingly saturated "deep brown" that a lot of amateur artists come up with when they color POC for the first time. To me that's the equivalent of giving a white character neon pink skin-- it doesn't look natural, it looks abstracted.
Anyway, here's an example of a 'dark' correction (Lightness +8).

In Paint.NET, 'Lightness' tends to add value while decreasing saturation, making it an easy fix for this. You just need to be careful not to go crazy with it and give the character gray skin (another pet peeve of mine...); red hue should dominate in whatever color you end up with.

Now if saturation is the aspect of the skintone that you want to emphasize; you want a brown with middling saturation and a slightly higher dose of green hue. Red should still dominate, but the green will make the brown feel 'warm' and lifelike as you carefully climb that saturation ladder.

This is a harder type of skintone to get right, so let me just show you the example first:

Yes, although this is much lighter and brighter than the 'dark' correction, this is still a very dark skintone. One of the things you have to recognize as you learn this is that skin colors are not a numbers game (which is why relying on 'set-it-and-forget-it' blending modes often sets artists up for eventual embarrassment); the perceptual saturation of melanin is more of an S-curve than a straight-line trend. This is why you will learn more through reference than by trying to just guess.

Anyway, what I like to do when creating skin tones like this is to first pull up the saturation a lot to make sure I have the 'color tone' I want (in this case, a slightly-reddish brown based on what I saw in the original image) then lower saturation and raise value until I get a 'calmer' brown that looks more like a skin tone.

If comparing numbers helps, here's the data on this 'saturated' correction. The numbers on the color you use don't have to match, but its RGB and Saturation/Value ratios should look something like this:

To conclude, I think anyone trying to get better at depicting dark skin should remember two things:

1) Always keep YOUR artstyle in mind. If you are drawing cartoons, do not reference from painters/photos, especially if you're a novice and you don't yet understand how lighting affects dark skin. Simplifying the complexity of a skin tone to a single flat color is a SKILL, and if you haven't learned it yet it's okay to just let other artists do it for you. Cartoons with characters of color exist; study their character sheets! And tons of artists of color have made up palettes you can pick from, find one that matches the palette of your comic and just use it.

2) Your POC viewers will not care that you picked the dramatically darkest skin tone you could imagine, they will care that the character looks good. Don't try to impress people, don't try to prove a point; just learn how to color a character's skin believably. It's art, not a contest; effective communication of the concept is the most important thing.

Adding onto what @DokiDokiTsuna said, I just want to point out that the majority of the edits of your character's image I'm seeing in this thread are borderline unseeable on my monitor. I keep my screen brightness pretty low, and as soon as I turn on my nighttime filter, I'm not going to be able to see anything at all.

There's a similar concept with nighttime scenes (one I had to learn myself), where artists will desaturate and/or blue tint the scene instead of actually making the colors super dark, because it's an effective way to convey darkness while still letting the reader be able to actually see what's going on. There's a lower threshold on the brightness slider where colors will get lost on certain monitors, and the color you've picked for this character is way past it. It either needs some very strong highlights, or you need to use a different color.

I dont know if this will help but, this is a picture of my character. Intead of lighter and darker highlights, it use different colors as highlights.

Here, I used purple and blue

Ooooo! I see it! That’s really good!

I think some other people have mentioned it, but references will be very helpful here as theres many ways artist have drawn similar characters over the years. let me know if these match the vibe you're going for, I tried to find artist with similar flats styles
from nymria on tumblr and insta
ami0amii on insta
jessiepaigedawson on insta
myasymi on insta
tewwatee on insta (not really the same style but might be what you're going for)
snooliensart on insta (love their art)
p0tatoo_zay on insta
antmorrisjr on insta (more stylized concept)
aranansi on twitter
Hopefully some of these might be helpful for you, whenever I have questions about how to draw black characters I try to see how other people are doing it, especially black artists, if none of these refs are any good for you I also provided the accounts so you can take a look for yourself :)) also if you're looking for an amalgamation of a bunch of primarily black artists works, brushbyvegalia on insta frequently features a bunch of black artists and you can find many there

Gonna just add that, if you want to study real life photos of someone with a very dark skin tone to improve your lighting/shading, look at pics of Nyakim Gatwech. She's a model, so there's loads of pictures of her with different lighting.

...I hope this wasn't directed at me, but on the off-chance that it was, I'd like to clarify my explanation:

I wasn't trying to say that certain colors can't be used at all to depict dark skin, I was trying to say that in certain contexts they do not REPRESENT dark skin well, simply because they make the image way too difficult to read.
There is a reason that POC cartoon characters don't usually have skin colors that are near-identical to the lineart colors-- the viewers won't be able to see! Lightening/brightening the skin color to fix an issue like that is not an "excuse", it's simply a color correction on the same level as toning down hyper-saturated colors so that the viewers don't get eyestrain looking at your characters, or changing the color grading of a film so your characters don't get lost in the shadows. When done correctly, the character's skin should still read as 'dark', just in a more skillful way that allows the viewer to understand and enjoy the art.

As I stated, real black people's faces are visible. So the faces of your fictional black characters should still be visible. There are TONS of shades you can use to make that happen; there is no skin tone that cannot be adequately represented by some color somewhere. But not EVERY color is right for the job in every instance, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Or I guess, to put it a different way: every skin tone can be represented by a range of different colors, the artistry lies in putting the right ones in the right contexts. A context where the color of your lineart is nearly the same is probably the wrong one to use that color in.
Like, even with a white character: you can't use your favorite vampire-white skin tone if your lineart is also white. No one's saying that skin color isn't allowed, they're saying the piece won't be readable if you use it there. So you need to either pick a new color, or change the surrounding colors. The context matters.

And yes, the simplicity of a style also matters, because simple styles tend to lose readability more quickly. Photorealistic pictures can use a wider range of colors and still read well, because they already contain a huge range of colors, along with more lifelike visual cues to tell the viewer what they're looking at. A photorealistic piece that's 99% shadow and dark tones can still be readable if you know what you're doing.

Meanwhile, if you're using a simplified style-- say, B&W manga-- and you decide your one black character should just be a fill-bucketed black silhouette because they have very dark skin, they're going to read poorly, and you're going to look like a lazy, racist artist. Deciding to use dark screentones instead isn't playing in anyone's faces, it's making a better artistic choice that actually represents the idea of a dark-skinned person in your artstyle, rather than looking like a caricature.

I hope I explained myself well enough this time; I really don't want it to seem like I'm saying something I'm not (artist of color here; I may not have darker skin myself but most of my family does, and I've been coloring characters of color since I was a child mixing the peach and brown crayons together).
At the same time though, I have to insist that dark skin is not magically the one area of art where anything goes and nothing can ever look wrong. You absolutely CAN make dark skin look wrong by making bad color choices, the same way you can make any other aspect of a character design look wrong. It is OK to choose one color over another EXTREMELY SIMILAR color if it makes your piece look better, and no mature artist will shame you for it.

...I really think we have to be able to acknowledge nuance in these issues if we want people to take the time to learn how to depict people of color well and feel comfortable attempting it. I've never liked how scared people sound when asking questions about this topic, but I can't blame them because critics are so quick to assume the worst...there are plenty of artists out there who are actually overtly colorist/racist and deserve that harsh criticism; there's no need to pick at someone who shifted a character's skin tone by 5%.

less at you and more of a general statement which is why i tried to include the note on spoons since i was tired while responding in the moment

i do understand the sentiment of lightening a color since the lineart has to be readable but my issue is when it comes at the expense of killing the saturation and making darker skin tones look grey. which isn't to say those shades dont exist but they also don't always look the best depending on how it's painted

as a fan of many art styles i'm aware of how folks have to make certain changes or adaptations to show things a certain way whether it's pixel, black and white, watercolor or otherwise and also an artist of color myself so hopefully itt's clear there's no shade there. its a big reason why i like to follow a breadth of artists to see methods to handle certain things stylistically coz i know i'll alwways have more to learn

i do apologize if it seemed like i was jumping the gun and i'll leave this as my last response

@Leyelle, are you black or know any black people? I'm going to assume no since you're having this problem, but getting advice from your subjects is usually good advice.

Practically speaking- Find some books on the subject. Malik Shabazz (Not the hotep guy) had a very well regarded art book called How To Draw Black People some years back.

I just did a search for it on Amazon, home of undercutting the competition, but it was over $100. This suggests to me that it's out of print now. I couldn't find it on his website either. Might be worth asking your local library about it.

Personally speaking- There's skin tone and there's skin tone manipulated for media.

I'm assuming Nyakim Gatwech is the inspiration for wanting a very dark skinned character. It might help to realize that a lot of photos of her are Photoshopped to exaggerate her features, like with all models. Wikipedia4 has a photo of her under normal lighting conditions you might want to look at. She's lovely naturally and her skin tone is good for manipulating into something striking, but it's still manipulated and thus, unreal.

What I'm getting at is that you can have a dark-skinned character with clear features without them being, well, drow from D&D.

I now see this was covered but it bears repeating.

Unless you're making a drow, or even Mr. Popo1. But those both require a far different approach.

BTW, my advice for anyone reading this post for drawing Mr. Popo is pretend you never heard of this character before and never will hear of it in the future.

Great! Grab your camera and take some shots of your arm under different lighting conditions. Then grab the eyedropper tool in your art software and start sampling and making swatches. Once you get a decent range of colours to work from you can start expanding and experimenting from there until you get some skin tones you can live with.

Dude, not all black people have the same skin color.

@Leyelle Is obviously trying to depict people who have darker skin, maybe even more so than her own.

like Sanegalese

Or South Sudanese

In hindsight I will say that my comment about desaturating nighttime scenes could probably be taken out of context; I agree that making dark skin look gray is probably not the right choice. I just meant that there are techniques to making colors look darker without having to make it invisible on certain screens.

The references from @theyrebothakilogram's post are a great example. All of them read as very dark, but I can still see them on my monitor, because the artists were able to utilize techniques that make the colors look darker without using a shade at 7% brightness.

But I'm white as a sheet with not as much experience drawing darker skintones, so that's about as much as I can say on the topic, lol.