Switch it up with these flat male figure art illustrations. Going for a surreal feeling with these drawings. Misplaced my dip pen, so I have been using microns for the inking. The backgrounds have been a mix of materials such as paint markers, acrylic ink, water-based marker. I pick by the color of the material for the background. I have been loving this loose style!
Been having these weird feelings that I cannot place, and the goal is to portray them in these pieces, because sometimes you cannot put words to something.
But you can also tell I have been having gay feeling lol
In my art, I create nude figures. Some are more feminine or more masculine in presentation. It depends on how I feel. Right now, I am dealing with a dysphoria swing, and I am constantly comparing myself to fit cis-gay men.
Because one of my main insecurities in dating seems masculine enough for others. I have a stronger desire to top, and I worry that there is a certain body type I have to fit. Even though I know feminine men also too, I am just being heteronormative. But as a trans man myself, I worry that I have to look a certain way to be taken seriously. So I end up comparing myself to cis-gay men and feel bad about my body. I am still pre-op and very insecure about my female anatomy.
But I feel like it is hard to talk about this subject because of the fearmongering around FTM bottom surgery in the community and how others body-shame trans men for getting it. Fuck, I’ve seen people body-shamed for bottom growth due to testosterone.
So how do I cope with all this?
By drawing naked people.
When I feel less bad about myself, I draw my body to celebrate it and mark where it is during my transition. But I have noticed that when I am more dysphoric, I paint more abstracted male forms. Weird vent art about how I want to be perceived. Sometimes the genitals are ambiguous, or there are none. Then straight penis.
I like to compose works that invite the viewer to feel a certain essence from the piece. For example, a playful, eerie, or soft and relaxed vibe. That is the first thing I want someone to say about the piece before they dissect it further. If I fail to communicate that, then I have failed with the piece. The whole thing falls apart. The artwork is total garbage.
Over the summer, one of the big things I want to work on is effective communication. So hopefully, keep the conversation on topic. My work is more about evoking the feelings I feel. It really confuses me when a different emotion comes up. It annoys me. So that just means I have to get better at creating the right stimulus for the intended reaction. Which just means understanding design principles and manipulating them to achieve the outcome I want. Instead of wasting away and watching brain rot, I’ll gladly spend my time studying art.
With the image I am using today, I was going for something that felt eerie, somewhat surreal, keeping it to a simple design and color palette. One of the design elements I was using was scale. For instance, to give a sense of distance between the bird and the tree, and to enunciate the important shapes. I used orange-red against the blue to really direct the eyes.
Maybe I am just a control freak, or autism doesn’t allow me to see a different perspective because of black and white thinking…
I came out at 12, about to be 13. I chopped off my hair. I started binding around age 14. I socialized as a boy. Throughout middle and high school, I enjoyed the arts. I was in the band, a part of the theater stage crew, and took art during my last two years of high school. When I graduated from high school in 2023, I drew in my sketchbook here and there, but I would go months without creating. It was November 2024 that I switched to injections. I had already been on testosterone for about 6 ½ months, low-dosing with the gel method. By upping my dose and using a method that better absorbed the testosterone for me, I was finally getting to cis-male levels.
I finally felt creative. I started working on projects. I remember being in the craft store, and seeing this large pad of bristol paper and buying it because I wanted to make art in a larger size. This was new to me, as I wanted to work in smaller sizes and draw my favorite duck species. Not only did I start to work larger, but I also decided to go to school for art, starting that January 2025. So I went in about a year on hormones, and I had no clue about my identity with my art. That I just wanted to create. While in my classes, I still had some creativity to make art of my own. I feel the need to make things.
My theory is that giving myself the right levels of hormones and quieting my gender dysphoria enough to allow me to express myself properly in the things I create, but also in how I dress. I would not be where I am today without HRT. I got to be this creative man. Something that should not be radical but is. Going through puberty knowing I was a boy was hell, and it squelched my self-expression because all I wanted to be was not seen. I never had the chance to explore my creativity because I wanted people to respect me as a man. But now, I don’t care because I look in the mirror and see a guy.
My art has definitely changed. I have not created fan art in a couple of years now. I have moved to abstraction and switched from digital to more traditional mediums like oil paint. Though I primarily work in ink now. Through my journey of finding my creative voice and settling into my masculinity.
I decided to go outside and meet some people. We met to paint the surroundings. I went off to a shady spot with a bunch of picnic tables and eyed an interesting composition of trees. It was an enjoyable day, but it was hot.
Translating the outside world onto a canvas is very spiritual. Forming the shapes and lines in my head, bringing out the colors I feel are shining through the subject, and making them subtly show through the assorted color gradations. It takes my mind to weird places. I lock in, ignore my surroundings, and focus entirely on the subject. I cannot hear what is around me. I am in a trance. Not even realizing that an hour has passed. It is weird, but strangely very calming. What I need after a stressful phone call and doctor visits. Working in this state, I still form a picture. The shapes are abstracted, but there is movement. The final image is still formed.
The composition I picked had three trees in front of a wooded area made of bushes and trees, but leaves made up most of the backdrop. Oil paint was definitely the medium to choose. The trees’ grey bark leaned red in hue, a stark difference to the green leaves in shadow. It was interesting to look at.
To add a bit of stress to the mix. I limit it to one or two brushes. Adds a bit of chaos. crashing into each other as they mix on the palette, the colors changing unpredictably as I paint. Keeping grounded, as I must think carefully for each brushstroke, or it will turn into mud.
In the end, I am relaxed. I completed something, and I am proud. I view it as a portal to how my brain thinks. That somehow, in my process, I feel this calmness that takes over. It feels like I am dancing. Nothing exists till I am snapped right back into reality.
my autistic brain having a special interest in art
I would say modern to contemporary art is a special interest of mine. It has affected my life choices. For instance, the path I chose for my college education. There are going to be visual studies at Temple this fall.
How has it affected me consuming art?
I get totally obsessed. I mean I made this blog to talk about it. Not only do I have to know the history, but also how it was made, and I try to recreate it by learning the techniques in my own art. It keeps me up at night. I can spend hours just sucking in a piece trying to analyze the tiniest sections. It is my life. Like I love learning about non-representational art. I am a very design-oriented person, and I can really spend hours researching a piece.
Some things I can go on about are the impressionist being inspired by Spanish painters for their looser style. I can go on and on about Marcel Duchamp and dadaism. Currently, they are hyper fixated on dadaism right now, for instance. Talk about the history of college art. There is a lot.
I cannot be normal when I see an artist’s piece I have been studying, because I get really excited about it. I will talk my mouth off if I get the chance to talk about a movement I have been studying. It can get exhausting because of how much it consumes me. That is why I say it is a special interest, because of how much it affects my life. At least it gives me a ton of inspiration.
