Multi-oriented: Someone Who Has Multiple Orientations, Such As Mspec Lesbians, Mspec Gays, And Mspec

fat bodies tutorial!

ALRIGHT SO my pal @kalreyno wanted help with drawing fat characters and as a fat artist i felt like i could give a bit of helpful insight on that. there’s also been a lot of complaining about “boo hoo fat characters are hard to draw so i can’t include them in my work Ever” goin on lately so if that’s your case then this is for you too!! and also just for anyone who would like help with fat bodies in general, ofc. anyway, let’s get this show on the road!!

let’s start with some common misconceptions. these are the two main attempts at chubby bodies i run into, so i’ll focus on them. 

the Anime Chubby i see everywhere, and it’s just……so wrong in many ways. first of all, there is almost no additional body fat compared to your average thin character - except for where it’s added in “attractive” places (breasts, hips, thighs). the breasts are way too perky, and don’t have the realistic shape fat would give them (though how to draw accurate breasts is another tutorial all on its own lmao). there is still a thigh gap, which usually only happens in very thin people, and bones are still visible on the surface of the skin, which also rarely happens in fat people.

the Michelin Man is better in some ways, but still not that great. it’s a slightly better attempt, but basically all that’s done there is taking a thin character and blowing them up, while giving no thought to fat distribution. the thigh gap is usually still present, and they look a lot more hard than soft - and fat is very soft and pliable.

here’s a chart on how fat usually distributes (if you can’t read my messy writing, “1. next to no fat, 2. moderate amount, 3. most of the fat distribution”). basically, the more muscle an area has, the more prone it is to develop fat, such as the abdomen, thighs, and upper arms. it’s important to note that fat sits on top of muscle, and that it does distribute in different levels, and not evenly across the body as shown in the Michelin Man. 

now, here’s an accurate fat body with all of that kept in mind!! notice how the fat isn’t only kept to aesthetically pleasing areas, and how it sits realistically on the character’s body. their breasts sag a lot more, which happens even in thin people with larger breasts, and the nipples are pointing more downwards than straight out. there is no thigh gap in sight, there are no bones in sight, and most importantly, they have fat rolls, which are very important in drawing a convincing fat character!! as far as i know i’ve never met a single person with no rolls at all, and everyone has them, whether thin or fat - they’re just more prominent and more consistently present in fat people. pay close attention to where they are and how they’re shaped.

here are a couple of drawings showing how fat is affected when sitting vs stretching. as seen in the first, the fat specifically on the stomach is distributed a lot more evenly and stretched out, so it becomes “flatter”. the love handles are still pretty visible, though, as well as the fat on the thighs and arms. the breasts are raised with the shoulders, and the fat on the shoulders and near the neck forms rolls as it’s being pushed together. 

in the second, there is a lot less room for distribution, so the fat is all pushed together. the breasts sag and the stomach forms rolls and spills into the lap. a good analogy for the way fat works is to liken it to a water balloon, and thinking of how its shape would change when resting flat on a surface, hanging off of a ledge, held upright, etc.

here are a few extra tips i find a lot of people miss!

first on the top is the hip/pubic region. the first circle is showing the way the bellybutton is folded in fat people, as opposed to stretched out in thinner people. the second is the stomach fat spilling over onto the pubic region and creating a separation in the two areas, which is something that’s missing in a lot of art. in addition, the pubic mound also gains fat, making it round as seen in the profile drawing i did up there (i’ve heard people refer to it as fupa?). the last in the hip region is the lack of a thigh gap. i can’t stress this enough!!!! if you’re trying to draw a convincing fat character, make sure their thighs are pretty much always touching!! for reference, mine literally don’t separate until my feet are about 2ft from each other.

the bottom right is showing the double chin, which a lot of people are afraid to draw!! fat does distribute itself here too, and there’s nothing wrong with it, so don’t feel like you shouldn’t give fat characters a double chin in your work for fear of it looking like a caricature.

in the bottom middle, it’s showing how fat affects different types of breasts with the presence of more or less breast tissue. 

lastly, at the very right are stretch marks with their usual locations and directions, which i also can’t stress enough!!!!! i sometimes forget to add them honestly, but they’re so important in accurately portraying fat characters, as they literally come from the skin being stretched from fat being gained (and they’re also just rlly neat lookin like why wouldn’t you lmao). some people have less and some people have more, feel free to experiment with them!

the last thing is body types!! there isn’t one single way for a person to be fat, so feel free to experiment with shapes once you’ve learned the basics!! 

so there you have it, a tutorial on how to draw chubs!! now go forth and make some accurate fanart or some rad fat characters, because the world could always use more of both. hmu if you have any questions or concerns, and thanks for reading!!

EDIT: someone pointed out the bad wording in the tutorial. thank you for bringing it to my attention and sorry for offending anybody. i’ve updated the tut, so please reblog this one!

i’ve noticed lately that i’m not really a person to other queer and trans people anymore. ever since i started openly identifying as a trans man, people have been much less likely to consider my experiences as serious or worth talking about, less likely to give me any sort of benefit of the doubt when discussing queer issues or gender, and much less likely to care if something they’ve said was hurtful to me. i've watched as people went from viewing me as a complex human being with deep thoughts and feelings and a complicated and traumatic past whose voice was worthy of hearing, to just Man.

and i really want to get across how serious this is, bc i know a lot of you will read this and just go “ugh another man complaining” and i would ask if you’d react this way to a trans person who wasn’t a man, but i know you wouldn’t. because i identified as trans nonbinary for years and wasn’t treated this way. people took my experiences with misogyny, fatphobia, transphobia, etc. seriously, didn't try to claim i hadn't experienced it or that it wasn't as bad as i was making it out to be. it was specifically when i started to use the label 'man', not when i went on testosterone or came out in my real life or had any sort of large meaningful change in my life or who i was. it was literally in response to the word i used to describe myself. that one word was all it took for the queer and trans community to decide i was no longer worthy of being treated like a person. and of course, this shift was happening when the rest of society was also deciding that because i was more visibly queer i wasn't deserving of humanity anymore to them either. it was an absolute mindfuck to be experiencing a significant increase in queerphobia and transphobia in my real life while simultaneously having the queer and trans communities deny that that was happening and start to dehumanize me.

and i really wish this was an online only thing, but it's not. there has not been a single trans event or rally or protest i've gone to in the last year where issues that primarily affect transmasculine people have been directly spoken about. it's rare to even hear the words 'trans men' at these events. at a rally i went to last week, one of the speakers said that "all the signs that say 'protect trans kids' should say 'protect trans girls'" meanwhile out of the approximately 10 trans trans people chosen to speak, only two of them were trans men. numerous mutual aid resources for queer people explicitly exclude trans men. when speaking to the parent of a trans boy the other day, they had absolutely no idea that trans men could be denied coverage for gynecological care if their gender marker is an "m", which their child's is. this erasure and dehumanization of trans men, even within the queer and trans community, doesn't just 'hurt men's feelings lmao', it puts us in danger.

so yeah. it's really bizarre to go from the world denying my trauma and experiences because i'm just a stupid deranged woman, to the queer and trans community denying my trauma and experiences because i'm just a whiny entitled man. because in neither situation am i treated like a human being in need of compassion. i'm just a blank slate for whatever gender stereotype people need to project onto me.

rules of engagement:

-do not tag this with "q slur" -do not insinuate that i'm making any sort of statement about trans women/femmes. i'm literally just talking about me and my experiences. we're not on a goddamn oppression seesaw. -ra/df/em lite rhetoric gets an immediate block. i'm tired of dealing with ur bootlicking asses.

The thing blue state leftists don’t seem to understand about red states is that telling minorities to “just leave” is really insidious. That is exactly what the republicans want. They want to make their state so miserable and dangerous and scary for everyone who isn’t a conservative cisgender heterosexual white Christian that those people leave. Leave behind their family, their homes, their friends, their jobs, their community, the places they’ve lived their entire life. With every person who leaves it is one less gay person teaching their children, one less person protesting outside the capitol, one less blue voter trying to stop the place they call home from sliding into fascism.

Many of us cannot afford to ‘just leave’ and many of us don’t want to because contrary to popular belief, North Carolina isn’t an irredeemable shithole with nothing to offer and no sense of community. People do leave red states for their safety but that does not fix the underlying problem, that doesn’t even make the problem better.

Listen, I know it's very much a thing that utopian leftists think that religions will simply stop existing once all of our material needs are met, but that is just not the case.

Human beings need ritual. If we are deprived of ritual, we make new ritual. It does not matter if you call it religion or state or whatever it is you call it, human beings will keep making up new rituals.

You cannot stop us, and saying 'this ritual which I like and doesn't hurt anyone else is fine, but that ritual which you like and doesn't hurt anyone else is bad' is just bigotry.

When I say 'you cannot stop us,' I literally mean you cannot stop human beings from making up rituals and religions. Leave a group of six year old girls alone near a mud pit for an hour and you will come back to a newly-minted faith. We make ritual. We make culture. That is what we do.

No, Judaism will not 'naturally cease to exist' when all of our material needs are met. What will happen then is that the Jews will get Jewier, because we will have all the time in the world to study Torah and write stories and make Jewish art. If you met all of my material needs tomorrow, two days from now there would be six more hamsas, a complete bound copy of all the volumes of the Talmud, and a shit-ton of giant Jewish art prints in my house.

You cannot stop people from making up culture and religion. It is, arguably, the thing which makes us human, one of the defining features of our collective humanity. We will always make up silly songs and new religions, and the idea that we'll just give all of that up for some vanilla yogurt and taupe jumpsuits utopian existence is absurd and beyond belief.

transandrophobia is why i dont feel safe in trans spaces anymore. transandrophobia is why i dont feel like i have a community. transandrophobia is why i feel unsafe at work. transandrophobia is why i dont have a birth family at all. transandrophobia is how trans men and transmascs die.

people shutting down our discussions, shoving us out, ignoring us crying out for solidarity. thats what gets us killed.

i have no snappy one liner for the end. im just tired, scared, and heartbroken.

A very beautiful image of these smiley blackfoot. It seemed everything was alright…

Photograph by Mary T. S. Schaffer in 1907.

Conservatives finally say the quiet part out loud:

They would rather have a dead child than a trans child.

hey full offense but the ‘use the right pronouns even if the person is horrible!’ statements arent made to coddle horrible ppl, its saying ‘dont view correct pronouns as a fucking privilege that can be taken away once people decide you’ve fucked up enough’, misgendering someone on purpose is transphobic no matter what bc it equates transphobia as a ‘punishment’ for bad people, pronouns are a part of baseline human respect, its that simple

terfs be like. i am going to tell you how to spot a trans woman. okay so if you think a woman is ugly you should harass them. this is beneficial to women

happy LDoV