At the start of the month, I finished a 30 Day Art Challenge on facebook. The rules were simple. I had to draw something; it didn't matter what or how, as long as I produced something art related. I had to spend about half an hour to an hour on the piece after I started; I could not stop in the middle of it and then pick it back up at a later time unless it was to completely retool the image from the ground up. Bathroom breaks were excused from that rule, naturally. Finally, I had to have at least 30 pieces by the end of the challenge. One piece a day, essentially, for the entire duration of the challenge.
I finished with 37 pieces, and a week earlier than when I was suppose to. I also was only one of two people who actually completed the challenge. The people that didn't complete it had situational reasons, so it's understandable. And at the time, I was growing to accept the fact that I wouldn't have a job for a while and was toying around the idea of selling my art as a source of income.
But as I went about that 30 Day Challenge, I noticed a trend among my drawings. My sexuality and angst (repression? I don't know exactly.) began to come to the surface with what I was drawing. Male figures with an Adonis built. My focus, more often than not, was on the torso area. I seem to favor the lean swimmer look that would make some guys look scrawny if they wore the wrong kind of clothing. Eventually, I would try to draw clothes on my figures, but they would still end up rather underdressed. It got to the point where I decided after I finished the ordeal to just start an IBF collection.
I don't know where I learned this term, but IBF stands for Imaginary Boyfriend. What that is seems pretty self-explanitory, so I won't go into it. But I find myself now in a rather odd frame of mind.
Here I am drawing sexualized male figures with idolized builds and subtle-but-attractive features, all while fantasizing that I'm in a better place than where I am now. That I'm not single, someone out there genuinely finds me attractive, and that someone is someone I also find genuinely attractive. The fantasy becomes real when I finish each drawing. And I've only drawn four images as of this typing.
The odd thing is that I'm using my webcam to take pictures of myself in the poses I'm drawing these IBFs in. I hate looking at myself, but when you're an artist, you are sometimes your own model as well. So here I am, posing with my shirt lifted to show my stomach knowing full well I don't have those lean six-pack abs I'm going to draw on my character later wondering "why do guys pose like this for facebook?" and "why am I drawing my figures like this?" The same though came across when I couldn't find a specific pose in stock photos and had to model it myself. There's nothing sexy about this pose when I do it, but when I draw a character in that pose, they become so sexualized and attractive, that they become my best drawings I've done in a long time.
And I keep fucking falling for them! I keep falling in love with my drawings of my fantasies, wishing they were real and hoping some day I would be able to stop talking to myself at night to comfort myself to sleep. That someone else will reassure me that I am worth a damn and help me feel good about myself. Because I'm starting not to believe my own words when I say them to myself at night like a mad man.
