I created this piece circa 2013 in high school art class, using watercolor paints and colored pencils.

This piece was drawn freehand with no references on a large sheet of paper. The sweeping rainbow-colored arc was made with blended watercolor paint, and everything else was drawn with colored pencils. When the image was complete, I glued the paper to a rigid foam board for structural support. However, the gluing process was poorly done and accidentally resulted in several planar distortions obscuring the surface. This unfortunate mistake nearly ruined the piece and was a valuable lesson learned.

The subject here is a young woman “making herself” from her own imagination, evoking the coming-of-age experience of an adolescent artist such as myself. Amazingly, at the time I made this, I hadn’t yet figured out I was trans, making this an unintentional and oddly prophetical self-portrait. (I even dyed my hair blue-green later in college!) I don’t know what my conscious motivation was at the time for drawing a female subject, but looking back on this and many other old drawings of mine depicting young women, it’s as if the young woman inside me was struggling to escape my subconscious and manifest herself in the real world somehow, despite my exterior self still obliviously pretending to be a young man.

Like most other artworks I created during this time, this piece has been lost. My only record of it is this photo.