Faculty of Art

Drawing and Painting: Digital Painting and Expanded Animation

McKenna Pipher

Becoming

Becoming is a frame-by-frame 2D digital animation with analog watercolour backgrounds.Working from my own experiences and desires, the narrative follows the affirming changes one person faces and explores magic as the trans intention to live in our fullness, without shame. It shows long-term masculinizing change over a short timeframe, aided by a fae, whimsical sort of magic.

“Becoming is a 2D frame-by-frame mixed media animation that combines analog watercolour paintings and digital animation. It explores the way trans people come to be in our bodies more fully – how we become ourselves – using my own experiences and desires as a guide. It shows long-term masculinizing change over a short timeframe, aided by a fae, whimsical sort of magic. It destabilises accepted narratives around transition: the sterile medicalization and pathologization of difference, the trans body as wounded, suffering, wrong. Instead, the body is a site of joy, of play, of change. Rendered in sketchy lines that reveal guidelines and shapes, the character themselves is in progress. They are developing, Becoming. And they are doing so with joy and love. I use in-jokes (top surgery is called yeeting the teats) and wordplay (testosterone is referred to as “T”, pronounced tea) to add to the playful tone of the piece, and found that actualising these things lent themselves to the magic I wanted to make.”