Is it possible to tell someone's sex from the way they draw?

Does someone's art style reveal their gender?

Once upon a time I'd have said no, but now I believe it is possible. It's not possible every time, but in a lot of cases you can actually tell pretty well and it's not so difficult. There's nothing mysteriously amazingly genetic or predetermined about it (not directly), you're a f**king idiot if you think that; we're just socialised pretty strongly along gender lines and this can show quite clearly in art styles, particularly imaginative yet representational stuff like comics...

This is not always the case, as I keep saying, because a lot of art is heavily stylised and in those cases you just can't tell. Good examples are American comic book style, certain manga styles, comic strip styles etc. But where an artist's work clearly shows a lot of personality their gender is as clear as an Adam's apple or a 5'O clock Shadow :)

Who else finds this and are there times when an artist has had you fooled?
Eunice P is a good example of an artist who very successfully fools a lot of people! A brilliant exception to the rule.

I would say no. Theres just too many variable factors, and influences. You can't really set up "rules" for how to tell the gender of an artist from their art.

The first thing I thought of was: Mend tend to have more angular art whereas women tend to draw softer curves. and the reason I had for this was that guys tend to draw guys more, and women tend to draw girls more. You have a better understanding of how your own gender looks than the opposite, therefore you cultivate that in early drawing attempts. Men are more straight lines, and women are more curvy.

But there are so many different artists on deviant art alone that blow that theory out of the water.

You can't really tell an artists gender from their art. You can make a snap judgment based on their style and what they choose to draw, but there's never much to those judgments. It's like trying to guess someone's race by the sound of their voice. It's a flawed hypothesis at best.

Could you guess from that?

My way of telling sexes is the way the guys and girls are drawn. Guys tend to be better at drawing guys and girls at girls. It influences the comic as well. In a guy's comic there will be more male characters. In a girl's comic there will be more girl characters... of course, what with fangirls and fanservice... there's going to be some tough decisions. There gets to be a point where the artist can be super good and there's just a better chance at guessing their preference. What does the artist like about the sexes? What do they wish they could have? What do they really see when they look at the other sex?
I think I could guess at what sex an artist is, though I wouldn't be right at least 20% of the time.

o_O; Why am I being used as an example???

...because...
you're timeless and awesome?

kingofsnake
You can't really tell an artists gender from their art. You can make a snap judgement based on their style and what they choose to draw

No one said anything about snap judgements King, and it's a lot more complicated than curved shapes and not drawing cars well... There are many subtle nuances that can all add up to produce an idea.
Mecha's example of drawing men and women is a good one, and what she says about 20% sounds about right too.
That's not 20% success rate, rather the amount of work out there that you could judge with some hope of accuracy.

Basically, to tell an artist's gender can take a lot of experience on the observer's part and even then you can't get anywhere near 100% accuracy, far from it! But you will always be a lot better than pure chance. It helps a lot if you can view a lot of different examples of their work too: So someone who tried to make "Snap Judgements" would either be an extremely confident master of the art of observation, or more likely; an idiot.

Generally speaking, I can tell. Well, less so "gender" and more so "gender role of the artist - feminine or masculine?".

As Double O has said, it's complex to do so however. One thing I consider when trying to guess the artist's gender (which I actually don't do frequently because I don't see the point in it) is to look at the artist's intended audience. A lot can be "said" about who the artist intends on viewing their art, if the art is in fact created with the an audience in mind.

I don't think I could do it with 100% accuracy (but who knows)... but I do think I could guess in the vast majority of cases if given the proper time and/or background information (the same piece of art created in different centuries, for instance, could have been created by differing "genders" - and thus knowing when a piece of art may be relevant in determining "gender" for me).

I think it's unfair - and poorly accurate anyways - to assume there's certain artistic traits for a particular gender. Of course there ARE some... but they're only generalizations that probably only apply to "lesser" artists anyways.

mechanical_lullaby
...because...
you're timeless and awesome?

I could be the Mulan of webcomics. One of the few ladies out there who actually spent effort drawing action scenes, explosions, guns, cars, machinery, robots, hot chicks idealized by some men etc. as opposed to fantasy and romance comics most commonly done by female artists. And it's even unusual that most of my comics lack romance at all. XD

Yeah, I had a lot of guys fooled. But most girls actually recognized my gender after reading my comics. Female readers have better intuition? Maybe.

yes, I think that is possible for one to know which gender is the person drawing...just looking some images.... but that is not all the time, there a re a lot of artist that have done th two styles....I am not going to mention names but XD....
I think the difference is in how clean the art can be...like for example, usually males tend to draw the lines with bold borders, or passes a lot of time the pencil in a drawing, womams, dont do that or not all the time, its always soft traces.... n.n....

I would say it's veery hard to do and very embarrasing when you're wrong. XD

For a while I though YOU, ozone, were a girl based on your art style. XD Seriously. I didn't know you were a guy until I saw your pic on the forums... that was a bitch slap to the face. A few other males I thought that were females have styles that I thught they were girls. O.o Bleedman on dA for example is one of them. XD

I don't think people should assume genders based on art style alone. :/

Hahahaha! Yeah, that happens a lot to me. I have to work extra hard to "assert my manhood". I think my trouble is that my main character is a woman called "Pinky" and people associate that with me too closely.

ozoneocean
Hahahaha! Yeah, that happens a lot to me. I have to work extra hard to "assert my manhood". I think my trouble is that my main character is a woman called "Pinky" and people associate that with me too closely.

You're a dude?

I'd never of guessed that from Pinky and her pant preferences. ;)

I suspect passerbys might think Nancy is drawn by a guy. She's a buxom dingbat, and all of the supporting characters are male. (Or male identified.) I even think that Anzie could be seen as being drawn in a masculine style by some.. it certainly has bolder lines, if that's a criteria.

I do make snap judgements about what gender I think someone is, and I think I'm usually right, but I make those based more on screenname and writing style (Esp. author's comments,) than drawing style. It usually doesn't occur to me that a style might be indicative of one gender more than the other...

I'm also going through a period in my life where I'm sick to death of the distinction between genders being such a big f-ing deal. That's just me, though.

I knew Ozone was a guy...

seriously... there's like an ass on every page...


oh, Reconjsh. There is no racism or sexism along my mind as long as I do not care.


usually males tend to draw the lines with bold borders, or passes a lot of time the pencil in a drawing, womams, dont do that or not all the time, its always soft traces.... n.n....


and this statement makes me not care about it at all. I can see where they've drawn the line. Besides, us womams have it nifty. I don't see the sexism in this.

ozoneocean
Hahahaha! Yeah, that happens a lot to me. I have to work extra hard to "assert my manhood". I think my trouble is that my main character is a woman called "Pinky" and people associate that with me too closely.

Actually, I bet on you being a guy right from the first perusal of Pinky- simply because it's rare to have a woman interested in drawing close-ups of female bums so accurately and so frequently. There's a sort of 'male feel' in the way you choose the angles and lighting when you draw your ladies.

There have been many comics though, where I'm on the fence about the gender. Out of curiosity, does Wolf point to me being female?

Wolf is one of those ones you just can't guess I'd say.

Aeon
I'm also going through a period in my life where I'm sick to death of the distinction between genders being such a big f-ing deal. That's just me, though.

Yeah, it's not an important thing, but it's interesting when you can tell from art or writing styles.
Actually I find it an even better game to play when trying to work out if there are differences between male and female novel writers and if you can tell their gender from their prose. It's very tricky!
I don't think there are any real distinctive differences in novel writing styles unless someone is doing something deliberately obvious.

I can tell.
Not 100% accurate (that would be ludicrously impossible) but i am able to tell when it's a female artist most of the time.

Fun fact: the vast majority of my fav artists are girls. Maybe that has something to do, or i just have a fetish.

well, being a female, most of the time, I can somewhat tell if the artist/writer is a female :o I pay attention to all the little details in certain drawings or the way a story is portrayed. But to tell you the truth, I've been fooled, a few times. Thinking that the artist was male and come to find out, the artist is a female :o And from personal experiance, i've learned that most female artists are better at drawing females than males (most, not all), and most male artists are better at drawing males than females :3.

I know me, I have my times where im struggling a bit with the guy characters. ^^; Times where im constantly redrawing the facial structures or the bodies, the facial characteristics, clothes, etc. But in my opinion, gender doesnt really matter to me when it comes to drawings and writings :3 Im open to all forms of art and literature, regardless of the artist's gender,race, or sexual preferance ^~^

btw, would you say The Faction looks like a girl or guy could've made it? :o

I don't know about girls being better at drawing girls and Vice Versa... Chris J of The Naughty Nurse draws his women beautifully! I don't like his men as much though... And Mina Lunga draws the most wonderful males, but doesn't put the same pizazz in her girls. So I'd say the opposite is true of your conjecture.
Oh, males might focus more on what makes a female a female and exaggerate those traits somewhat (and females will do the same with males), while just being boringly staid with their own sex, but it's the enhancements and exaggerations that make a portrayal interesting ;)

For The Faction, I would say a girl. Mainly because of the small mouths, sharp, delicate features, the expressions, and the attention to detail on the costumes. Great fashion sense!

BUT, this is probably coloured by my perception that you are a female anyway... I don't know. Sometimes an artist might fool people by claiming to be the opposite of their sex, even though their art says different. In that case people will believe despite what the art's clearly telling them... It can be hard to find examples of this but they're out there.

Actually, I know a few of girls actually considers Ozone's comic "super-male". XD Mostly because of the bum shot. XD

ozoneocean
BUT, this is probably coloured by my perception that you are a female anyway... I don't know. Sometimes an artist might fool people by claiming to be the opposite of their sex, even though their art says different.

Yea, im really a girl :3 I like fashion ^~^

hehehhh someone thought I was a boy...
I was completely perplexed, since my user name is KRISTEN GUDSNUK!!!

I can tell.

I can tell EP's drawings are female-oriented. I just didn't think too hard about it, so I just went with "oh he's an effeminate guy."

Females don't draw males OR females better than male artists. In fact, it's the men who draws the most lifelike life drawings. Because life drawing is the same as drafting; the male comics artists who don't find beauty in exaggeration, find beauty in realism. The female comics artists find beauty in expressionism, and you always find that their life drawings of either sex contain a degree of stylistic deviations from reality.

I don't know if this applies outside of comics/manga. Likely not, since painters/sculptors have different artistic emphasis/goals compared to story-telling artists.

I can tell but I'm not quite sure how. I think I may cheat because its a lot easier for me to tell gender by the way an artist will write their rants/blogs with the comic.

I always got pegged as a guy. Why is that?! Seriously.

While some things are usually dead obvious...I have to say no. I've guessed an artist is a girl when it is a guy and viska-verska. XP

@ Juno:

Cuz you give off the air of being butch.

mlai
@ Juno:

Cuz you give off the air of being butch.

LOL! I do or my characters do?!

It's the cars isn't it? ;)

There are some subtle clues if you look over an artists body of work. Its really subtle, you do have to know what you are looking for. Often times its a combination of color/shading choices, hardness/smoothness/blockiness of lines, choice of angles, figure designs, detail niggles, its all really really subtle. Also, as was said, its not 100%, there are some women who have a 'masculine' drawing style and men who can pull off a more 'feminine' style. Just as a casual observation, I notice that guys tend to be more comfortable using hard shadows, tend to have more strait lines, use a cooler color palatte, and usually depict females from more sexual angles, but the female figures tend to be depicted using more 'masculine' body language. Male figures tend to be depicted as masculine with attention to muscular detail and stuff like chins and noses. Guys also tend to like to be very detailed with clothing, weapons and stuff like that, particularly 'signature' stuff. Story telling can also give clues, since I notice that even while a guy might write about interpersonal relationships, they are less subtle and tend to be more event focused than many stories of similar type I've read from female authors.

I notice a lot of women tend to prefer softer shadows, or softening harder shadow edges, use a warmer color palatte, and often neglect, simplify or use very organic backgrounds. Not many female artists ( that aren't pros) enjoy doing longshots of buildings or enviroments. Guys seem to be more inclined to do them. The only real exception I've found is when the background is organic, such as forests or natural settings. Girls don't seem to mind this. Female lines tend to be more delicate, rounder, and smoother than guys. Female figures are often less sexualized in terms of angles ( although they might still be very sexy, but the angles they show them at are rarely closeups of boobs or butts unless its purposeful.) They are also often depicted as more... practically clothed? Whereas males are often feminized, given softer features with much less muscular definition. They might still be quite masculine looking (facial hair or squarer jaw), but the musculature will generally get covered with clothing. But there is always a sort of organic look that never quite goes away. I also find that females like to focus the most on figures, and the body language depicted is usually more feminine, even on men. Females also like to focus on interpersonal relationships and devote significant page/story space to them, with events taking a backseat or having significant impact usually to the personal lives of the characters. Female storytellers also tend to like to give their characters messed up love lifes, with many layers of relationships and interconnections, love triangles, etc. Male storytellers don't usually do the same level of 'overthinking' women tend to on this.

There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. I know there are some (rare) female pencilers for Marvel and DC titles that would be hard pressed to tell they are female, but looking at someones professional/commercial work is more difficult to tell than their personal work. Or if that person is trying very hard to achieve a particular look that was origininated with one side or the other, they will adapt their artisitc conventions to match.

But its all very subtle. It takes a really practiced eye and a fairly large body of work to judge to make a call. I find that I often find a male or female 'vibe' from a design or work, but it sometimes isn't a reflection of the artist, sometimes its the author if they are different, or a particular effort to step outside of regular work. Also, sexual orientation seems to influence this. I've seen some very feminine artwork from gay fellows, while I've seen some very 'masculine' work from lesbian females.

I'm usually pretty good at telling boys from girls.

I don't think anyone's ever mistaken me for a girl...

Everyone thinks I'm a guy.

It's funny, because I'm not offended at all. Hey, does my style look like it's a guy's? Sure, the avatar may trip you up, but I'm not a guy!

But remaining as a complete mystery is kinda cool, actually. I think.