• concept art •

this is the first sketch i've done for a loveghost's music video. they approached me with a clear concept in their mind. the story was set in a high school where a boy decides to wear a dress for the first time. this was particularly interesting for me because animation has a history of using overly 'feminine' gender markers to make a distinction between characters and it is often assumed that a genderless/neutral character is a boy. so i had to be careful that putting a dress on the character won't make the viewer automatically simplify the story to be about a shaved-headed 'girl'.  fortunately, by today there are more and more illustration&animation examples that explore gender as not just a binary thing, but back in 2018 it was a good challenge for me to render that we see a teenager who was biologically assigned as a boy, yet who is also 'feminine' into a drawing.