comme d'habitude

there are a pile of fashion magazines on my floor right now. not for leisure reading, but so i can draw facial features. (remember, i'm taking 12 hours of figure drawing a week.)

i was perusing some of the magazines while sketching the other day and realized how i looked at every body and every face with a pinch of salt.

it dawned on me that, because i've been drawing real bodies for twelve hours a week for the past two months, i really know what a body looks like. a real human body. flesh, blemishes, marks, hair, freckles. all of it.

i always knew that those magazines were completely photoshopped, but i never knew to what extent until now. and it gave me this sense of empowerment, knowing that i know what a body looks like, and that those bodies in magazines aren't real.

it makes me sad that people look at those magazines and feel like they need to reach this unattainable standard. because they don't. because the bodies and the people in those magazines remind me of the fake, platinum, plastic-ness of the people in the capitol in the hunger games. they aren't beautiful bodies. the bodies that i draw on a daily basis are beautiful. the real people that i see every day of my life are beautiful.

you, my friend, are beautiful.

sappy as it may be, don't let anybody else tell you otherwise.