While I was building up responses from my survey I set about to draw some female figures. To my understanding, the female figure is overly sexualised in near any form of advertising as my essay research suggests. I wanted to have a go at drawing nude women that weren't necessarily sexualised and that didn't fit to the norm of bodies that we usually see plastered on billboards and in magazines.
It was so refreshing to be drawing actual women. Personally, if i ever draw a female figure I tend to make them slim, and tall, with perfectly round breasts and bums because that's what I perceive to be a desirable body shape. It was nice to be able to draw women with curves and bumps and fat rolls and all that other stuff, it actually made me feel a little better about myself because I was drawing these bigger ladies and they didn't look bad at all, they just looked like ordinary people.
I was listening to some TED Talks in the background while sketching these out and found one that really resonated with me. It talks about how if we see more images of larger bodies rather than photoshopped 'perfect' bodies we in turn become happier with our own and start to prefer the idea of having a bigger, curvier body than one that's slim and perfect. The idea of a 'visual diet' is brought up, and refers to the images that we consume everyday. We are constantly fed images of slim, toned, tanned women, so that is what we want to be. If we were to be fed a variety of images with a huge diversity of bodies, we would become more accepting of a wider range of body types and therefore our own.
"The more we see that kind of body, the more we like that kind of body"
- Lillian Bustle
After watching and listening to this TED talk I think I want to focus a lot of my visual journal work on a range of different bodies, exploring body diversity and self-love.
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