oh hey not to discourse but if youre drawing trans girls there…is a happy medium like you don’t have to draw hulking men in dresses but drawing a cis girl and tagging it as trans for hashtag representation points is…..also iffy especially if you the artist are not trans like….look at real trans girls and their bodies and use that as a reference…research things like how hrt and ffs can affect peoples looks and use that knowledge to further your diversity in your art instead of drawing offensive caricatures or tone deaf pictures of cis girls passed off for performative representation
a good place to see the effects hrt and transition in general has on various types of bodies is the transtimelines subreddit. dr bart van de ven has an image gallery for before and after facial feminization surgery, as does dr spiegel. if you are looking for body references the transpassing subreddit has a lot of variety. of course that’s not mentioning the tumblr tags (which probably have nsfw in so be careful). the thing to take away from this is that when you are drawing trans girls you aren’t drawing men in dresses nor are you drawing cis girls with no boobs; trans women are as varied and as unique as cis women in their appearances and this deserves to be recognized and accounted for, and not as a lazy afterthought.
i’m getting a lot of salt and angst over that post almost entirely from young, white artists so i’m just gonna drop one statement on it.
obligatory “i’m white”. obligatory “i’m not the best artist and am still always learning”. obligatory “i was a beginner too”. fact of the matter is, though, that what i brought up in that post is not endemic only to beginner artists. it’s something i see very technically skilled people doing, and it demonstrates a very fundamental flaw in the notion of “aesthetic”.
altering a character’s features as portrayed in their canon (or god forbid, an actual real actor) so their complexion is creamier, their features are narrower, and their hair is smoother is a deliberate choice. art is translating lines and shapes into something cohesive and recognizable. you choose to make those lines.
if you are using the wrong ones, you lose cohesion.
stylization does not mean recognition is lost.
the situation described by my post can range anywhere from ignorance to the notion that the human face is not a template with interchangeable potato head parts all the way to a malicious belief that non-white features are ugly.
i’m not making accusations one way or another.
but i am saying that it’s very, very noticeable and the hurt you might feel by me calling you a fucking gremlin doesn’t really compare to people seeing themselves be erased in art. i am not engaging anybody directly over the matter because quite frankly 90% of the angst on that post is from teens. get better. use references. don’t be defensive when someone points out offensive behavior.
finding out picasso died in 1973 feels like the fakest thing ive ever heard. everyone talks about him like he lived in a cave with nothing but a torch and paint he made from berries or bear shit or somethin but nah this dude probably sat down watchin looney tunes thinkin “damn i should draw some dude with a nose on his forehead thatd be dope” i feel so lied to
i hate when the teacher’s like “write about a bad time in your life” like i ain’t tryna get a social worker up my ass, thanks tho fam
This ain’t no joke I had to write a essay about what your scared of so I did it (I was scared of growing up and where my life was going) it was great got a 100 but then I got sent to councilors office and was sent to therapy cause they thought I was suicidal and on the verge of breaking…Apparently they ment like spiders or some shit…
Also like, not everyone finds that at all useful or cathartic.
“Write about some difficulty you’ve experienced personally.” “Aight fam let me just break down into tears and skip the rest of my classes.”
Yes! I had a psych professor ask us to discuss outloud the hardest thing that ever happened to us literally two days ago and I said “you realize the position you’re putting us in? I feel obligated to lie to not only save my peers the awkwardness but also because I will find no relief in answering honestly but rather anxiety. The hardest thing in my life is having people repeatedly tell me I should find some sort of catharsis in reliving my trauma so someone else can feel pity for me!”
The whole class backed me up because they didn’t want to either! Those kind of exercises are only helpful for people who don’t have any real past/current issues– which is no one btw.
On par with this are those fucking self-assessments where they want to to be optimistic and positive about the future. You’re sitting there drowning in college stress and anxiety so bad you can’t look another human in the eye, fighting depression so that you can eventually achieve a piece of paper that might get you a better job if the economy doesn’t tank itself (guess what, it did), and the most optimistic thing you can think of is that the class ends in 20 minutes.
There’s a WIRED article that explains the history behind this practice.
Basically, this guy named Jeffrey Mitchell had a traumatic experience, then after months of PTSD, he told a confidant about the event that traumatized him. Retelling the event to a confidant was so cathartic for Mitchell that his PTSD went away after. He did a bunch of research to see if his personal experience of catharsis and relief could be replicated in other people suffering from PTSD. Years later he published a paper proposing a formalized psychiatric treatment revolving around this idea that expressing a traumatic experience helps relieve it. The paper was so influential that the whole psychiatric community adopted “critical incident stress debriefing” (CISD) as a standard treatment for PTSD.
Unfortunately … it’s bullshit.
Not only does the CISD treatment program Mitchell came up with not help the majority of patients who try it, but it actually makes PTSD worse in the majority of patients who try it.
The WIRED article explains why:
CISD misapprehends how memory works…. Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past.
None of this is true. In the past decade, scientists have come to realize that our memories are not inert packets of data and they don’t remain constant.
…the very act of remembering changes the memory itself. New research is showing that every time we recall an event, the structure of that memory in the brain is altered in light of the present moment, warped by our current feelings and knowledge.
Basically, Mitchell waited until he had some emotional distance before trying to recall the memory, and he had full control of the situation. It was fully his decision. Nobody was pressuring him to talk about it. So he felt safe. Thinking about the memory from a place of safety allowed his brain to re-contextualize the memory as harmless.
Conversely, pressuring a patient to recall a traumatic memory, particularly when it’s still fresh in their minds, makes the patient feel very unsafe. Recalling a bad memory in this unsafe context only serves to re-traumatize the patient.
Okay I know it’s beautiful, I know, but here’s the thing: it’s a trap. Because that’s almost definitely like 600% a kelpie, and if you touch it it will drag you into a river and eat you.
Please enjoy this very pretty and Not At All Suspect horse.
tumblr backup 