Project Director: Megan Vossler
Part of our 2021/2022 DLA Faculty Fellows Cohort

I am interested in developing a new open educational resource for figure drawing. The idea for this project first emerged from conversations with trans and nonbinary students about the restrictive gender binaries perpetuated in contemporary figure drawing textbooks and resources. I have spent the last several years rewriting my lectures and creating new image sets that changed this language, while also searching for books or reference materials that did not perpetuate this outdated approach. My extensive dive into the current literature about figure drawing found not only outdated gender binaries, but also sexist, racist, and ageist imagery and language in many of the most popular books. I am now envisioning a new figure drawing resource: one that will be a collaboratively-written, truly inclusive figure drawing guide, which will include true diversity of race, age, gender identity, physical ability, and body type in terms of visual representation, and which will avoid binary, sizeist, ableist, sexist and ageist language and images.