I considered a number of things while creating my illustration. First, I chose to create a blind-contour drawing, based on a medical illustration of toe walking. Toe walking is a behavior I see a number of my students, especially students on the Autism spectrum, exhibit. In that context, toe walking is typically seen as a negative behavior – something to be unlearned. However, in other contexts, such a dancers leaping across a stage, or people wearing high heeled shoes to a special event, toe walking is seen as less unusual or undesirable.

I also considered gender a factor. There are so many Western ideas around feet and gender, that the more I thought about it the more it surprised me. I myself, as a cisgender woman, am tall and have “large” feet – I wear a size 10 (size 9 in men’s shoes). It is something I used to wish I could change, and was embarrassed about when I was younger. We tend to expect men to have large, wide feet and for women to have small, slender feet. We expect women’s bodies to be hairless, starting just below the eyebrows. I am reminded of some graffiti I saw once at a train station that stated, “Your girlfriend shaves her big toe.” It made me laugh out loud, and pointed out the ridiculousness of women removing hair from parts men never even considered.

I chose to add this RGB split effect digitally to my illustration, as I considered the interesting facts around the split of melanin production in human evolution, and it’s adaptation over time. It is interesting to consider a future where this change perhaps happens more rapidly, or how melanin content in skin affects our ideas of health based on where we live in a more common knowledge way.