#|| The caveat is that I don't have a proper profile for any of them except my Founders OCs (and I think two newer)

[hatredcurse]

Shaking all my OCs out on a tray table.

[lethesbeastie]

Hi, I saw your post about practicing drawing fat people and I was wondering if you could compile like a list of resources or references?

It can be difficult to find resources for drawing the wide variety of forms fat bodies can occupy, so I've done my best to bring together some resources I've been able to prove have some degree of diversity in the references they offer!

My primary resource recommendation for drawing fat people is Morpho Anatomy For Artists: Fat And Skin Folds! It does a wonderful job breaking down where fat accumulates on the body, how it interacts with the familiar landmarks of human anatomy, and what sort of shapes it tends to form under the influence of gravity. It's a phenomenal reference and my top recommendation for anyone seeking to improve at drawing fat people!

When it comes to finding decent photo references for fat people, the pickings are frustratingly slim. Most sites that specialize in pose references either don't have fat models or have all their images behind paywalls. Of the resources I looked through, the best sources for pose references were Adorkastock and Line of Action.

@adorkastock actively seeks to provide an incredible profile of pose references with diverse body types, and as an added bonus you can access a lot of their images for free on their site/Tumblr or join their patreon for early access to images! Line of action is a site aimed towards practicing figure drawing, providing images and a timed function to challenge artists to sketch within a set time limit. I took the time to go through roughly 300+ images and was pleased to find that during my session around two-to-three out of every ten photos were fat models. The only caveats to this was the fact that most of the images were of the same individual, limiting the applications for studying the variants of fat bodies. Still, it's an amazing tool that has a free mode and allows you to filter the types of references you want based on age and level of nudity.

Beyond sites that specialize in art reference photography, there's also the ever popular Pinterest, which is the site where I typically seek references for my personal studies. Due to the nature of Pinterest's extensive collection, there's a vast variety of references for different fat body types that includes a lot more "everyday" people. The primary issue with Pinterest however is the rampant reposting and lack of proper credits for images, which can make things dicey depending on how you wish to use the references you find. For personal studies this isn't really an issue, but for any sort of professional or paid work is something to be aware of just for the sake of accountability.

* For those who are 18+, porn photography of real people also offers an incredible wealth of visual resources for fat bodies and how they interact with gravity/movement/etc. The variety of positions and angles offer many opportunities to study human anatomy, and it's a pretty well-known fact that drawing NSFW art can be an important learning experience for those struggling with drawing anatomy. In the end, it depends on your personal level of comfort with viewing/drawing explicit images, but it's not something you should completely overlook.

Last but not least, look at the work of artists you admire who draw fat people! While I typically recommend sticking to photo references for learning anatomy, studying artist's portrayals of fat people is also incredibly helpful for learning different tactics for simplifying and/or stylizing fat bodies to better fit ones own style. There are also plenty of artists who've crafted tutorials detailing their approach to drawing fat folks, so I highly recommend you check them out as well! I hope the resources I've linked here can help you in your studies, and feel free to drop another ask if you have any more questions! I'm planning on posting a tutorial on how I do studies for fat people soon, so that will be an additional resource for you once I've got it posted!

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

so I'm not sure of your general position on rpf (real person fic) but literally the entire ao3 for british comedy is just p0rn and it's frustrating. like, I just want some cute fluffy stuff

Okay. So, my personal opinion on the fanfiction of real people thing is that it's generally bad, for sort of the same reason why tabloid culture is bad. These are real people, and I think it's shitty for the internet to be full of stories - whether those stories have a basis in reality or not - about personal parts of their lives.

Having said that, there's one major caveat to this: I believe what's "okay" should be judged based on the actual harm it does to a person, and a story that a celebrity can't find isn't going to harm them. The process for getting a membership on Ao3 is open to everyone, but it takes a couple of steps and usually a couple of days. If a celebrity goes through that whole process and then searches their own name on there, then I think it's fair to say whatever they find is their own responsibility. However, it should take any real person that much work to come across a story about themselves. What I'm saying is that if you want to write fanfiction about real people, the "members only" feature on Ao3 is not only your friend, it's your ethical obligation. And I also think that sort of thing is fine in any other situation in which the actual person can't find it, like in private chats among friends.

For myself personally, I will say that while I don't think there's anything unethical about putting fanfiction about real people in a place where those real people cannot find it unless they look for it really hard, it does feel instinctively weird to me so I don't actually read it. But I'll admit I have done some searching on Ao3 just out of curiosity, to see what's out there. And yeah, maybe curiosity has led me to click on one or two of the actual stories to see what they're like. Some of them are very well written, enough so I might enjoy them if I were able to read them without feeling incredibly weird about the idea of making stuff up about a celebrity's personal life. But genuinely, I hope all the people who enjoy reading and writing them are having a good time, as long as they use proper restrictions.

And to be clear, I'm not claiming to be "too good" for fanfiction in any way. There's a reason why I've been able to sate my curiosity about the locked British comedy side of Ao3, and that reason is that I made an Ao3 account years ago so I could read all the stories on there. I've never posted from my Ao3 account, but that's only because my fic writing days were behind me by the time Ao3 became a thing. I just checked, and learned that if I Google "Fanfiction.net + [my old username]", I can still find my account on there, from which I posted several stories as a teenager. Also, Jesus Christ, I just reread my old FF.net profile and it reads like a parody that someone would write now about what a fourteen-year-old might write about themselves in 2004.

To the subject of the original message... I do agree that it's nice to have non-pornographic options available in all areas of life. Have you considered writing some nice and fluffy stories yourself, and then posting them with the members only feature on Ao3?