wouldn’t you want to see yourself reflected in the things you love?
i’ve been interested in the arts, especially visual arts (drawing/painting/illustration) for as long as i can remember. i fell in love with drawing back in middle school, and it’s not uncommon to spot me doodling away in my sketchbook or on any piece of paper i can find while i’m in class. i started out by drawing really crappy anime art that i learned from my short time in japanese class, with blocky lines and obnoxiously large eyes that bulged from the person’s face. they were objectively really bad drawings, let alone cringey. i would include pictures but i don’t remember where all of those old sketchbooks are, so i’ll save both us of that embarrassment.
the progression of my art style to what it is now came with the development of my racial identity. my art style is still heavily stylized, with influence from anime art, but is much closer to realism than in the past thanks to me taking time to study what people actually look like, but i also draw more folks of color than i ever did when i was a grubby little middle schooler. i’m glad that i’ve grown and become more aware of myself and the world around me and that my art isn’t limited to ambiguously white emo vampire kids. here’s an example of what my art style looks like now:
A drawing I did for Inktober (a drawing challenge for the month of October) of a modern witch girl. She is sitting down in front of a book and a wand with an exhausted expression. There are various pens that I used to draw the piece with placed aesthetically next to the drawing.
along with me blossoming into my identities, expanding my knowledge of race and ethnicity, the way that i view art and my various hobbies—from anime, tv, movies, video games, music, and more—has become more focused on issues of representation. i’ve become more picky about the media that i choose to consume, and more critical of things that i’ve enjoyed in the past or that i continue to enjoy. i feel like this is reflected in my art style as well. i want to see more people of color in our media sources, but not as tokens. not as stereotypes. not just written in to fill a quota. as ourselves. our real, raw, authentic selves. it’s also okay to admit when we are interested in media that can be considered problematic. i think the most important thing is that we own up to what’s wrong with what we enjoy and remind ourselves to challenge those problematics and call them out when they show up, and if things become too much, too hurtful, it’s okay to walk away from that thing that we used to enjoy and move on to something else.
what media have you enjoyed in the past that is different from what you enjoy now? are there things that you’ve become more aware of that you think about more now that you’ve grown up? how have you grown as a person, and how is that reflected in your interests today?