Since publishing the acrodicted-website 8 days ago I received a lot of feedback via comments, PM and emails regarding the roles in my illustrations where the man is always the base and the woman always the flyer. To be honest I didn’t spent so much time on this topic until now and I am happy to improve acrodicted together with you in this context. In my own acrobatic training I like to switch the classical roles and I myself know a lot of very good female bases!
When I was creating the illustrations I was not thinking much about the relevance of gender and the gender roles in acrobatics. I wanted to create technically correct and also beautiful illustrations to supplement the text description of the poses on the website. I started illustrating a male figure as base and a female as flyer and did not question this pattern in the following creation process any more. (Sorry for this..!) I discussed this topic with a lot of friends in the last days and I came to the conclusion that I will create more illustrations with other role models.
The other feedback that I received was about more individualization about body shape and skin color. For the moment I want to continue with the existing figures and not design new figures with different appearances. The reason for this is that creating new figures is enormously time consuming. For practical reasons I chose to work with stereotype figures and not with asexual stick figures. In my opinion the realistic representation of the figures supports the overall picture of a figure. I didn’t mean to offend or exclude anyone and hope that you understand the before explained reasons.
Regards from sunny Munich!! This Monday I will leave to Bangkok traveling for one year around the world. During this time of course I not only want to see the world but also continue working on acrodicted and publish many other poses and new features on the website. The best is yet to come! ;-)
Simon