Body Diversity - Tumblr Posts
♡ Body type diversity ♡
Begging character designers to stop doing this.
I didn't know until recently.
But it turns out that advertisers tend not to use actual athletes in women's sports advertisements. 🤦🏾♀️
This is because many women who train extensively in sports, won't fit the delicate look of what mindless sexists deem to be an "appropriate" (lesser) amount of muscle development, size, and definition.
Advertisers will even prefer to find a model who isn't athletic in the slightest, then just slap athletic wear and gear on them, and use pictures of them running around for their commercials.
The problem is SO bad, that some women athletes will actually try NOT to train beyond a certain point: so that they can maintain the softer, feminine look that will attract corporate sponsors. 😰
...Meaning that these women athletes probably COULD perform even better than they already do.
However: if they can't get the sponsors to fund their their training and participation in the sport, then these women athletes can't afford to, right?….
Which ultimately loops right back around and affects what the general public thinks men and women are even capable of as far as physical prowress...and, artificially narrows our ideas surrounding the range of how men and women can naturally look when performing at high levels of athleticism….
Just another way that capitalism ruins everything!
👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾✨ All kinds of women punching a hole in the unscientific idea that big women "can't be fit" and are "just automatically unhealthy"!
One day folk are just going to have to admit that the real concern that they have against fat people is them personally not being attracted... and SIT with that...and hopefully finally understand that the weight and shape of someone else simply ain't any of their damn business to mind 🤷🏾♀️
"But NORMAL People's Bodies Didn't Look Like That!" ...right?
Some of you may have seen my post about Baroque artists and their realistic depictions of human bodies as having skin and fat.
I've had a lot of negative and frankly fatphobic comments on that post, calling the people in the paintings "fat" and "obese," mostly along the lines of this:
"It's because the artists are depicting rich people, who were fat and lazy. Normal people didn't look like that!"
The idea, of course, is that these artists wouldn't have ever drawn bodies that looked like those in the Baroque paintings, if they weren't painting super-rich people that stuffed themselves with food all day.
Supposedly. We'll see how well that holds up.
Today I was in the library looking at a collection of drawings by Albrecht Dürer, and learned that in the early 1500's, Dürer tried to put together essentially a "how-to-draw" book, showing how to draw people. His work was controversial, because of his technique of "constructing" figures using rules about proportions. (A quick and easy method of inventing realistically proportioned bodies out of thin air? Cheating!!)
However, in his "constructed" drawings, Dürer had to figure out how to handle the range of variety in bodies, and ended up breaking down how to create a variety of body types in correct proportions.
I'm showing the women, to contrast with the post on Baroque paintings. Here are some of his drawings that I thought y'all should take a look at.
These are a couple of his more "average" women—the one on the left is from his drawing book, and the one on the right is one of his drawings.
Here's a "strong woman" and "A very strong, stout woman"
This is what he refers to as a "stout woman."
Here's where it gets interesting: this is what Albrecht Dürer refers to as a "peasant-type" woman
^That. That's what a "peasant" body type looks like.
He labeled this one "A peasant woman of 7 head lengths"
in case you missed it: this figure drawing by a guy in the 1500's is literally labeled as being of a peasant woman! this is what a "peasant woman" body type looks like!
He did draw similar amounts of thinner figures, but they're not particularly emphasized over the "Strong" and "Stout" figures. Nor is there exactly a "default" figure. He's just...going over the range of variations that there are?
Here's another "stout woman," covered in notes on how to draw the proportions:
now that's too technical for me to make any sense of but
this was in the 16th century!! This body type was apparently not incredibly rare in the 16th century. This body type was important enough for you to be able to draw, as an artist, in the 16th century to be handled in detail in a 16th century artist's drawing advice
In conclusion: yes this is just what people look like, yes it's important to know how to draw fat bodies, even this dude from the early 1500's is telling you so, Die Mad About It
all of this is from "The complete drawings of Albrecht Dürer" by Walter L. Strauss
Been trying to expand on the different body types I draw, primarily trying to draw fatter people. So I picked my girl Cassidy, and then decided I had to draw her girlfriend too :3
There's an index card on libby's face cause i fucked it up and has to redo it lmao