By Theertha Raj
Haven’t had your share of gorgeous artwork for the day? Women Who Draw is a stunning new directory of female illustrators, cartoonists and artists who take up freelance work, that started on 12th December. Although the site is built professionally for art directors and editors who are looking for freelancers, anyone who visits it will definitely end up loving it anyway. It has earned enthusiastic commendations, and everyone was talking about it so much that that the site’s servers actually crashed for a brief while soon after it was launched.
According to it’s About page, Women Who Draw was created by an anonymous group of women artists, “in an effort to increase the visibility of female illustrators, female illustrators of color, LBTQ+, and other minority groups of female illustrators.” It joins websites like Cartoonists of Color Database, and the Queer Cartoonists Database, as a response to the struggles faced by artists from minority groups and female artists in getting commissioned by major publications in the US.
The main page depicts the distinct style of each artist with thumbnails including links to their personal websites. But what’s interesting here are the tags associated with each artist, which declares their ethnicity, religion, location and sexual orientation. This both accepts the ways in which these women self-identify, and also highlights artists who perhaps wouldn’t have much visibility on a conventional forum. Along with capturing the diversity of the community, the clean-cut, minimalist website is an aesthetic whirlpool of awe-inspiring art, and you might end up hopping from one exquisite website to another for hours.
The signing-up process to be featured on the website is pretty straight-forward, and it’s open to all female-identifying professional illustrators. The collection mostly features American and European based artists, but Women Who Draw is still a work in progress, so we hope to see more artists from around the world on it soon.
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