/ Sara Radin /

DoubleTap: Pink Bits

DoubleTap is an interview series highlighting creatives whose work explores sex, body, and identity.

The world of Australian artist Christine Yahya is a colorful cornucopia of different body types. With 62K Instagram followers, there’s something deeply endearing and approachable about her page, @pink_bits, which features a mix of hand-drawn portraits, doodles of things she loves, and a number of commissions. In a time where conversations about body positivity are rising and the movement is being increasingly co-opted by corporate entities, Yahya’s accounts acts as an authentic celebration of “the bits and shapes we’re told to hide,” honoring the bodies of people who have inspired her in addition to nameless characters she has created in her mind. What results are beautiful humans of all shapes, genders and sizes who embrace their differences, such as varicose veins, underarm hair, and keloid scars. Her work is almost like a visual record of our collective humanity, in which we can see ourselves shining back at us.

In this interview, we speak with Yahya about this body of work and her process for creating these illustrations.

What inspired you to launch this project?

Christine Yahya: I created the initial illustrations one night whilst drawing for leisure and took the pressure off myself to create something so serious. I’m often drawn to viewing and creating art that explores the human experience and human form. So, I took out some bootleg Copic markers I got from Armenia, and tried to find a reference photo to base my illustration and curved lines on. I ended up just wanting to see my own curves represented on paper, and actually drew from my own naked reference photos.

I quite liked what I had drawn—which for someone with a long and complicated history with their body was a wonderful feeling. So I wanted to share the illustrations, and created an Instagram page that night on a whim and continued to upload more illustrations in the [same] style. I continued sharing in the hopes other people would enjoy them, maybe see themselves in the pieces, or feel that same sense of representation I did.

How long have you been developing this body of work? How do you hope to grow this series in the future?

Pink Bits started around October of 2016, so close to 2 years now! It has gone by so fast. In future I’m hoping to quite simply create more and represent more people through my work! I’d love to develop and create more things for people to have and hold, that let them feel represented and understood by. I’m currently in the midst of setting up a new website and store, which will hopefully be up and running soon. I hope to collab with wonderful creatives, and work with people or companies who I admire and the respect the work that they do.

What is your process for creating these illustrations? Do you draw from real life? Do you make these digitally or by hand?

When approaching my sketchpad I come with a trusty pencil and eraser, and lay down the basic line work, and then apply color using Copic markers. I then scan these and add any details that need a digital touch, and prep the piece to share online—so a mix of by-hand and digital. I draw most from reference images, my own photos or experiences.

What has surprised you most about doing illustrations around body image and identity?

I’m surprised at just how much my perception, sense of self and self-love has shifted and grown whilst creating these illustrations. By creating illustrations to represent and celebrate as many people as I can, I’ve learned to celebrate myself too, and see things I once saw negatively on myself more lovingly. The way I view and approach my body and mind is completely different to the damaging place it was in just a few years ago. I also have a much stronger sense of self, self-understanding and appreciation that was definitely not there before.

How do you use your artwork to champion inclusion, diversity, body and sex positivity?

My illustrations at their core aim to champion each of these things. I do a little self-assessment of my feed regularly and try to consider who or what I haven’t represented yet, or haven’t represented in a while; I then approach my paper and get sketching, making sure I’m representing as many people and communities as I can.

I approached my followers at the beginning of 2018, and asked them who or what they’d like to see represented this year—I often refer to this list too. I also keep an eye out for wonderful people who I’d love to draw or are doing great work in various communities.

What do you hope viewers will take away from seeing your illustrations?

Representation and self-love are the key things I’d hope viewers would feel when seeing my illustrations. I hope they feel understood, seen and celebrated.

You can follow Christine Yahya on Instagram here.

DoubleTap: Ariella Elovic’s Cheeky Illustrations

DoubleTap is an interview series highlighting artists whose work explores sex, body, and identity.

From plucking one’s nipple hairs to having anxiety about pooping while on vacation, Ariella Elovic’s illustrations look like they were ripped from the pages of a teenage diary; it’s no surprise her candid scribbles for her project, Cheeky, are quickly becoming an Instagram favorite.

Elovic draws inspiration from some of her most personal anecdotes, combatting societal shame with clever humor that’s laugh out loud funny. In this way, her illustrations serve as palatable commentary on body insecurities and the ways in which stigma can hold us back from living our collective truth.

In this interview, we speak with the artist about her work and what she hopes viewers will take away from seeing this project.

What inspired you to launch this project?

AE: My work on Cheeky is inspired by the women in my life and the conversations we have about our bodies. Through connecting on shared and personal experiences, I began to feel a lot more at home in my skin—upper lip hair, jiggly thighs, period globs and all. I hope my illustrations spark similar conversations and help alleviate some of the shame and isolation so many of us feel in relation to our bodies.

How long have you been developing this body of work? How do you hope to grow this series in the future?

I launched Cheeky about five months ago, but I’ve been ruminating on these ideas for a while. Initially, I was working on a series of illustrations about my personal journey with IBS, and found that I kept wanting to go off on tangents. Poop became period poops and period poops became period leaks, long pubes, and nipple hair etc. I’d love to turn this series into a book, that’ll be my next big project. Some cute Cheeky pins would be fun, too.

What is your process for creating these illustrations?

Most of the work I make for Cheeky draws from my personal life, thoughts or insecurities I have—typically if it’s something I’m embarrassed to tell other people, it’s something I push myself to share. I was pretty embarrassed about my nipple hairs a year ago and now it feels (almost) as normal as having eyebrows.

Do you draw from real life? Do you make these digitally or by hand?

I paint everything by hand using gouache, and then scan and touch up a bit in Photoshop. All notes are handwritten in pencil. Painting myself also makes it pretty easy in terms of needing reference imagery. I’ve got a pretty incriminating series of selfies/mirror pics.

What has surprised you most about doing illustrations around body image and identity?

I’m surprised by how much I’m sharing in public—granted, it’s illustrations and not photos of my bare body—but a lot of what I paint has been on topics I would have never dared share in the past. This work has really helped me process and embrace my own insecurities.

How do you use your artwork to champion inclusion, diversity, body and sex positivity?

Sharing personal stories highlights how unique we all are, but also all that we share. We all have self-doubt, we all have felt rejection, we all have felt judged (either by ourselves or by others). When I use Cheeky to communicate a vulnerability, I hope it encourages folks to be kinder to both themselves and those around them. Empathy can be hard to practice, but it’s so incredibly important. Especially now.

What do you hope viewers will take away from seeing your illustrations?

I hope viewers relate to the work in some way, laugh, and feel less alone because of our shared experience. Ultimately, I want Cheeky to instill this sense of connecting to your body, yourself, and really owning it. Speaking to my personal experience as a teenage/college-age girl, I spent a lot of time making myself look the way I thought I should look (read: contorting my body to bleach all my dark arm hair and wearing spanx under jeans, both incredibly uncomfortable). Letting go of that pressure and stress is hard—and a process—but I’m getting there and Cheeky is helping.

You can follow Ariella Elovic on Instagram here and find more of her work at thecheekyblog.com.

DoubleTap: Hilde Atalanta

DoubleTap is an interview series highlighting artists whose work explores sex, body, and identity.

For artist Hilde Atalanta, both gender and sexuality are a limitless well of creative inspiration. Based in Amsterdam, the 29-year-old illustrator and painter uses graphite pencils, watercolor, acrylic paint, and black ink in their quest to reveal the inner workings of diverse identities and relationships. In addition to making custom portraits, Atalanta runs two projects, The Vulva Gallery, which explores sexual health through illustrations of all kinds of vulvas, and You’re Welcome Club, which focuses on body positivity and inclusion. Atalanta hopes their artwork challenges the way we see and experience our bodies by showing us a spectrum of human beings in all shapes, sizes and colors.

In this interview, we speak with the artist about their creative process and the inspiration behind You’re Welcome Club.

Hi Hilde! Will you tell us more about you?

H: My name is Hilde Atalanta, I’m 29 years old. I’m an illustrator and painter, living and working in Amsterdam. I love making portraits, and I like working in different styles. I mainly work with graphite pencils, watercolour, acrylic paint and black ink. I recently started making bigger works on canvas. My work revolves around the search for identity and different forms of relationships, sexualities and gender identities. In my work I like to play with gender; many of the – often androgynous – characters I paint are based on female models. Besides making portraits, I’m working on two other projects. With The Vulva Gallery I focus on body positivity and sexual health education. With my most recent project You’re Welcome Club, I focus on diversity, body positivity and inclusivity.

What inspired you to launch You’re Welcome Club?

In the past two years I’ve been running The Vulva Gallery, where I’m portraying a wide variety in vulva shapes, opening up conversation about sexual health and related topics. After a year I felt the need to broaden my view; I wanted to speak about human diversity in a broader sense and I decided to start up a second account: You’re Welcome Club. The general reason for focusing on diversity is that I’ve been noticing over the years that the popular media are portraying a certain image, “ideal” or “perfect” women and men. They are mostly thin/athletic models, often white—and mainly very feminine women and very masculine men. Many individuals (including myself) don’t recognize themselves in these models, presented as “ideal” women and men. Seeing these “perfect” models can make an individual feel insecure about themselves, even feeling left out—as it’s often an impossible standard they have to live up to. However, seeing oneself represented (in popular media) can give an individual the reassurance that they are normal, that they belong, that they are part of our society. With You’re Welcome Club I wanted to make a series of illustrations where I’m showing a wide diversity of human beings, with different kinds of backgrounds, sexualities, gender identities and body shapes. An honest representation of our society, but with the emphasis on individuals that aren’t often portrayed.

How long have you been developing this body of work? How do you hope to grow this series in the future?

I started You’re Welcome Club in August 2017. I’m hoping it will keep continue growing into an even bigger and more inclusive series, and an interactive and supportive community.

What is your process for creating these illustrations? Do you draw from real life? Do you make these digitally or by hand?

I draw all illustrations by hand. First I’m making rough pencil sketches, and I’m tracing those with a black fineliner. Then I’m scanning these line illustrations, and I’m coloring them in using Photoshop. I’m also planning on making a series of paintings using acrylic or gouache paint.

What has surprised you most about doing illustrations around body image and identity?

There’s so much more diversity in the world than I’ve could have imagined before portraying this diversity.

How do you use your artwork to champion inclusion, diversity, body and sex positivity?

I’m simply representing diversity. I feel that images can tell stories and convey emotions in different ways than words can do.

What do you hope viewers will take away from seeing your illustrations?

I’m aiming to make a series of illustrations in which people recognize themselves. I want people to feel welcome, to feel included, and to know that they belong in our society just as much as everybody else. Also I want to represent and thereby normalize bodies that aren’t often portrayed. By portraying a wide range in body diversity I’m saying: all bodies are good bodies; we are all valid human beings and diversity is a wonderful thing.

I would love to live in a more inclusive society, where people are open towards each other’s differences and where they respect each other. I noticed that simply respecting other human beings seems to be a difficult thing. It’s easy to get confused by someone who looks different. It’s easy to be scared of people who feel different from us. Still, I feel we need to invest in having an empathic, or at least respectful attitude towards each other. The world is full of diversity, why would we ignore this? It would be so boring if we would all look and act the same. We can learn so much from our differences. It’s simply so much more interesting to look at the world from all kinds of different perspectives. “Different” isn’t something to be afraid of, as there’s so much beauty in our differences.

Intentionally Alone

Twelve months ago I made a pretty big decision. I decided I would not date for a full year. I know what you are wondering: why close yourself off to meeting someone completely? And if you know me well, then you must be thinking: but don’t you facilitate a story-telling collective all about dating?

It wasn’t until last summer that I realized I had long been using dating as a way to fill the voids of myself. Though I had mostly relished in my single status the last few years, I often felt myself being pulled by men who offered me glimmers of happiness instead of finding that within myself first. After a breakup, a death in my family, a major surgery, a toxic roommate, and an attack by a dog on the street (yes, that actually happened!), I realized it was time to refocus my energy inward and work on accepting myself on my own for an extended period of time.

Following all that trauma, I started seeing a therapist and learned I’ve been living with mental illness, which made it difficult for me to find peace within myself. And these struggles had long extended into my dating life. Realizing this was difficult as I looked into my past and discovered patterns and explanations for so many of the hiccups in my dating trajectory: there were countless times I used sex as a way to communicate with my partners because I never fully felt comfortable saying what was really on my mind. And while my anxiety kept me from speaking up about my needs time and time again, my codependency had caused me to do things I didn’t always want to do all because I felt a desperate need to be liked. Frequently, I got swept up in the idea of someone, and prioritized partners over me instead of figuring out what I truly needed because I was so used to putting everyone’s needs before my own. There’s a reason the partners I previously picked never stuck around—I can now see many of their shortcomings as a mirror of my own.

Though I’ve taken dating breaks in the past, I decided this one would be different. I’d fully commit myself to aloneness for an entire year. In other words no dating apps, no dates, no sex, no flirting, no nothing. I’d focus solely on healing myself and making strides towards my personal goals. This also means I would live a life in which I would no longer be vying for the attention of men. Now that I think about it, I’ve been trying to get their attention since I hit puberty. That’s at least 16 years of dressing or acting a certain way in order to attain the attention or validation of a man so that I would feel “complete.” Whoa.

Initially, my decision elicited mixed reactions from those around me—many of my female-identifying friends responded with the question: but what if you meet someone worthwhile, then what? While my guy friends reacted as though it were no big deal. It’s interesting how men and women perceive aloneness differently. As time went on, people asked less and less about my relationship status and dating life, just as I began to care less and less myself. Over time, I came to see myself as a full and thriving human being, regardless of my singledom.

As my year of aloneness ends, the past twelve months have acted as my own little revolution against the patriarchal ways in which society has told women that singleness is unattractive and aloneness is undesirable. In spending quality time focusing on self-care and establishing more independence, I have learned that I don’t need anyone but myself to feel worthy or valid.

These days, I think less about how I look or how attractive I am in the eyes of men, and instead, have given myself more quality time to hang out with my thoughts and feelings. It’s been a refreshing exercise in letting myself be quiet and more in touch with my needs.

While I would still love to find the right partner someday, I don’t worry as much about being alone forever. Recently, I told my therapist how little I crave a relationship and how fulfilled I feel on my own. She says this is the perfect time to get back into dating and practice everything I’ve been working on: establishing autonomy, exercising boundaries, and managing my anxiety.

Wish me luck!