In monochromatic works, such as some Comic Books and Manga, shading is a vital aspect of design. Due to the general lack of colour in the works, shading is the main way to utilize colour.
Unfortunately, not all artists shade their characters in a logical or consistent manner. Examples include a character with tan skin having the same shading as a character with pale skin, or a character whose hair is shaded darker than intended. This can result in fan confusion when adaptations or coloured artwork is released.
For technical reasons, tanned skin might appear nearly black when printed by certain printers. Another issue is that drawing variably tones skin or hair might be costly on time and ink, at least if the comic is drawn traditionally, so the artist may have to draw them with other characters.
Compare to Inconsistent Coloring and Hair Color Dissonance.
Examples:
- Boku to Boku:
- Jun's hair is brown but his white shading suggests a much lighter tone.
- Izumi has bright red hair; however, his dark shading implies brown or black hair.
- In The Disastrous Life of Saiki K., Saiki Kusuo's deep pink hair is shaded black in the manga panels, akin to characters with black or very dark hair.
- Fruits Basket:
- Tohru's hair isn't shaded, making it appear blonde or light brown. However, in coloured pictures and in both animes her hair is actually dark brown.
- Motoko's hair was shaded similarly to Kyo's, so in the first anime her hair was a reddish brown. Her canonical hair color however, revealed in the reboot, is nearly black.
- In early chapters of Gunslinger Girl the dark-skinned blonde Triela was shaded the same as the lighter-skinned girls. With Art Evolution, her skin became shaded later on.
- Hori's hair in Horimiya is dark brown, but it lacks any sort of shading in the manga. What makes it especially weird is that there are other characters who canonically have much lighter hair colors but are given shading.
- Inazuma Eleven: Max has ginger hair in the anime and most coloured artworks, but in the manga panels, it's shaded black.
- Akira from Kanojo ni Naritai Kimi to Boku has medium-to-dark brown hair that is unshaded, which makes it look lighter.
- Naruto:
- Gaara, Sasori, and Mei Terumi all have dark-red hair that is entirely unshaded.
- Karin's hair is shaded very dark, akin to black-haired characters like Sasuke, but she has cherry-red hair. The same goes for Nagato. Oddly, Kushina and Mito are so far the only red-hair characters that are given dark grey shading, even though for all four red hair signifies that they're from the same clan.
- One volume cover shows Kidōmaru has an Ambiguously Brown skin-tone, but his skin lacks shading in regular manga panels.
- One Piece makes very little use of grayscale shading, so all hair is depicted as white or black. White is used for blonde, red-head, green, and blue, while black is used for dark red, brown, dark blue, and black.
- Pokémon Adventures occasionally suffer from this. Black and White have brown hair like their game counterparts, though White's hair is somewhat lighter than her game counterpart Hilda. However, the shading used is the same one used for black haired characters.
- Shouko from A Silent Voice has dark brown hair in the manga, but her hair is shaded much lighter. As a result the animated film adaptation changed her hair to a light red (which is used for stylization in manga artwork).
- Wandering Son had this for the first four volumes. Characters like Takatsuki and the Nitori sibling's parents all had brown hair in colored work, but their shading implied black. Eventually they were retconned into having black hair. Brown haired characters like Nitori and Mako, on the other hand, have unshaded hair that's mistakable for blonde.
- An iconic plaque was sent out on the Voyager satellites, the first man-made objects to leave the solar system. It featured line drawings of an adult human male and female to show our appearance to any alien who might find it. Unfortunately the female's hair was not shaded in, leading to criticisms of it showing an idealised Caucasian blonde - even though a closer look reveals her facial features are Oriental.
- Donald Duck's blue sailor suit is, in old comics, often painted black.
- During the John Byrne run, the Fantastic Four began wearing black costumes with white collars, boots and gloves. Despite explicitly being described as suchnote , the suits were often colored with blue shading, which sometimes led to them being depicted as outright blue by colorists (which was further solidified by the first season of the 90s cartoon).
- In Scott Adams' Dilbert series, the character of Asok is meant to be a diligent hard-working Asian, but his relative darkness of skin is lost in the monochrome version, thus losing half the point of the character, who many fans perceived as white.
- Zoe from Venus Envy has dark red hair that isn't shaded in the comics.
- This is referenced in DuckTales (2017) when Donald loses his trademark blue sailor suit and it is replaced by a black and white one.
