This is a drawing that took longer than I wanted (it took forever to decide what she should wear) but it's a drawing that I feel is important.

Around 2021 my life started to become more stable and I started to notice weird things about me, things that were always there but I just ignored because I thought they were things everyone went through, I was just obsessing over them because I'm autistic.

September 2021, I had a dream about a shark girl. For some reason I didn't understand she was specifically transgender. I did a quick sketch that I've uploaded before.

2022, I was finally able to begin to improve my life and these odd feelings were getting worse, I was starting to notice it everywhere. I always felt an attachment to female characters, I wanted to create female characters and in any video game I played I always chose the female option. I knew this wasn't right for a someone who was supposed to be male but I just thought it was an autistic obsession. June 2022, I finalkly discover that most people never question their gender. That finally pushed me to read up about being transgender and finding out about gender dysphoria. That took five hours because I was crying so much. I had always suspected I was transgender since I was a teenager (and before then I would always behave in ways that I thought was more apporpriate for a girl), but I thought I was never actually transgender, but after reading up on gender dysphoria, there were so many symptoms that were so oddly and strangely specific that if I had knew what to look for, I would've known a lot sooner and maybe my life wouldn't have ended up the way it did.

This shark girl was supposed to be based on a tiger shark. I planned out the tail and did think about adding stripes, but looking at photos of tiger sharks I didn't like the snout shape, so instead I based her snout on lemon sharks and sand tiger sharks. I didn't draw any stripes in the end because tiger shark stripes look more like elongated spots that fade away in adulthood. I decided to give her fox ears because the genus name, galeocerdo, comes from the Greek galeos, meaning shark, and kerdo, meaning fox.

Her tail I wanted to draw so long that it would have all the fins found on a shark. I ended up running out of room on the paper so that's why the tail is curved in that way. I didn't know what to do with her skirt until after I finished when I realised that if she's wearing a skirt, she would have a skirt with a split for her tail.

The three quarter headshot was something I thought to try. I wasn't sure how to draw an anthropomorphic shark face at that angle and it still doesn't look quite right. I did try to draw her face with the eye hidden behind the snout but that didn't look right.

Around her neck she's wearing a necklace with a sand tiger shark tooth. At that size and with the hole it does kind of look like a Tri-Ryche.

The overall impression I wanted to give with drawing her is to make her look cute.