Why R U So Fat Essay

My evocative production is a drawing which conveys the lived experience of males with the mental illness and eating disorder anorexia nervosa (AN). Males account for 10-25% of AN and bulimia cases whereas 0.2-0.3% of all cases are lifelong in males (Sabel, Rosen & Mehler, 2014). I gained inspiration to illustrate this issue through a personal encounter with someone who was in recovery from the disorder. Unfortunately I realised I was stigmatising and stereotyping him because I made the assumption that as he was a male, eating disorders would not affect him. I soon realised from discussing this issue within my community, stigma and stereotyping was commonly projected towards males with AN as the disease is widely accepted as an exclusively female’s disease. To challenge these commonly incorrect and hurtful …show more content…
Centring the text also allowed it to be the focus of the artwork which draws the viewers in. The laptop the male is reading from is dull in colour to allow the attention to be firstly on the speech bubble but the importance of the item is emphasised by making the it disproportionally large compared to the person and the detail allows the viewer to understand that a social media cite is being displayed on the laptop. The male, left to the speech bubble, receiving the insult is coloured blue to convey the negative feelings he has towards the comment. The text in the males head is kept the same colour (red) as the bold comment in the centre to emphasise the relationship between the comment and how the person interprets the comment. When drawing the man, I made use of water colour, which allows the colours to bleed together to emphasise his depressive mood further. The detail of the person’s physical features are kept minimal to convey his emotions through his posture and the colour of the