How do you draw a human child character without revealing their race and gender?
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I'm working on illustrating a project where a couple imagines adopting a child, but they don't know what the child will look like. Does anyone have suggestions on how to draw the child without making assumptions about their race and gender? The child needs to be human.
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@allevolz If they are imagining the child, they could imagine the child differently every time they think about it (so you could have a different race and gender combination for each illustration that includes the child)
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@allevolz This is a hard one! It's pretty easy to make babies gender neutral. Just dress them in neutral colors like green, turquoise, yellow, orange, etc and don't use any bows or dinosaurs. The race one is harder. Babies are usually bald, so that would help. But I'm not really sure how to get around skin color. You could perhaps do the illustration in gray scale? Or perhaps instead of just showing one baby, you could show many babies of all races, genders, etc.
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@allevolz You could skirt around the race issue by just drawing the baby in line art or even dotted line... which may work since it is imagined so it is distinguished from its real surroundings.
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@allevolz could you please tell us more about the story?
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Not sure if this would fill the needs of the story, but maybe it can be implied through storytelling objects, for example showing a little pair of shoes next to their adult shoes? Or set the scene strategically so that the people in it are vague but expressive silhouettes or cast shadows?
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One way I’ve seen illustrations avoid showing a specific race is by using very unnatural colors like red, blue, or green.
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Right, like others here, I was going to suggest taking an analogous approach to each spread. You could make each page of the story using just tints, tones, and shades of a single color. Maybe page 1 is all done in pink and page 2 is done in orange, etc.
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I'm sorry if this is obnoxious to show my own work as an example, but I wanted to make sure what I said was clear... Maybe something like this, but instead of a bird and the ladybug, you insert your child character and whomever else is in the story:
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@allevolz You could do darkened silhouettes of the happy family! It's a poetic way to showcase something that is not quite tangible yet.
