The Wordsmith's Forge

I tend to mark skin color based on context. Where most of the characters are similar, the exceptions will stand out. In the desert I have to describe the shades of brown because they're very different from each other. In the Steamsmith series, I mark Maryam's skin as dark in most of the poems, because people might read those individually, and she's black in England, and it matters. Switch over to Kande's Quest and it doesn't come up very often, because the human characters are all black. But there's a lot of attention paid to the White Demons, who are caricatures of European features in the same way that many fantasy monsters are caricatures of African features.