noisymouse:

Inktober Day 16: Fat

This was a difficult one to do, and it shouldn’t have been.

I had to do a little bit of reading and see if “fat” is a term that overweight people are comfortable with as a descriptor for themselves. If the prompt is “fat” and I draw an overweight woman, is this an insult?

I had to look around to find some decent references. This ended up being difficult. I realized how infrequently I draw fat characters, how I’m not experienced with it. This is my own fault, and also indicative of deep institutional biases. The art that I studied in school, with a few exceptions, overwhelmingly favoured thin subjects. The anatomy classes I studied in school, WITHOUT exception, taught the forms of a thin human body. The art styles that I am aesthetically interested in don’t often feature fat subjects. I have no history of images and practice to draw from. And coming from this institutional bias, I have over the years failed to challenge myself by drawing fat subjects, and building an artistic competency with it. This drawing took the most number of drafts and redraws out of all the inktober drawings I’ve done yet.

And as I was drawing it, I had been wondering what kind of response it will receive, if I’ll get the same kind of comments that other artists have received who dared to draw fat subjects and especially fat women in non-negative contexts. (Bad comments, in case anyone was wondering. A drawing of a fat woman who is attractive and comfortable with herself and not the butt of a joke is apparently very threatening to a lot of people)

I could have avoided all of this by drawing something silly and humorous, a round little creature, (my first idea was a drawing of the Frog Prince) or some kind of safe and non-positive depiction, a funny old woman, a maid, a witch, something where I’ve made it clear that the character I have drawn is not supposed to be attractive.

But I didn’t want to draw that. I wanted to draw a powerful, haughty, attractive, fat empress. This idea ended up being more challenging than I had anticipated, and it gave me a lot to think about, made me realize a lot of things I need to work on.

Anyway I hope you like her, because she doesn’t give a damn what you think of her.

At
the end of the month, my drawings with the most notes will be cleaned
up and made available as prints and a calendar, so like and reblog the
ones you like best!

I have a patreon: check it out to see sneak peeks and WIPs.

All my inktober posts can be found here, and last year’s inktober posts are all here!

(for some reason these tag links won’t work on mobile, either open in a browser or just search inktober 2017 or 2016 on my blog)