Hi!! Yeah... I believe you're right about me softening facial features in my ALOTO drawing. I think I need to spend the next few days making studies of more masc traits. So thanks for the push, honestly! I have some archives/blogs saved, but if you have time and desire to share additional sources of butch/masc portraiture that you think could be helpful, I would be really grateful (no worries if not, of course!)
Hey there. I just saw this. I wanna say thanks for taking it to heart and not getting ruffled by me. I am an artist, too, so I know what it’s like to deprocess from the crap the world teaches us about “good looks” and what’s a “flattering way” to draw anyone, but especially a woman. But I’m also a disgruntled transmasc/NB/GQ butch dyke and wish that physical androgyny and visible homosexuality in people’s features wouldn’t be ignored but prized and valued as its own kind of beauty.
So. Thanks for dealing with my gruff attitude about it. I’m just really used to normie straightpassing-4-straightpassing dykes who avoid us to hell and back out of their internalized shame, and even externalize it by punching down on those like us, and people making that kind of art can be a way to do it — that is, they only like butch lesbians if they have long hair like the ALOTO butches and their butchness can be ignored or downplayed to pretend they’re just slightly tomboyish but otherwise feminine “normal girls”.
Basically, gayface is real (and not just in butch women or fem men but in many others — but it’s avoided from its association with us). And IMO it’s handsome/beautiful in its own right, as a whole different beauty standard outside of straight society’s ideas of looks…. And it has a likely cause, just as our entire LGBT existence does. But not everyone can appreciate that, so they shun the topic as taboo instead. And sanitize our image via art, or any other way that they can. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes because they are just used to it.
Unlearning this is hard but worth it. Kudos to you.