This diminution is seen plainly in Rodin’s watercolors. The watercolors naturally follow the pencil sketches within our chronology, because since the final paper cutouts are of mostly watercolored figures, it would defy logic to imagine Rodin cutting up his watercolor-laced drawings before he had even added paint. In The Moaning Winds (right), we see two women folded one on top of the other: one lying down with her knees bent up, and the other’s back propped against the thighs of the first, straddling her. Both women’s heads loll back and their limbs appear limp, as if they were asleep or dreaming. The contour line has faded even further since that of Sapphic Couple, outlining the bodies loosely, almost casually. It wobbles, declining to follow the form of the women’s limbs precisely, rising and falling in a relaxed undulation. The details are beginning to melt away: we see the semblance of a nipple, a toe perhaps, but not much more. The figures are washed over in the same pinky-brown, further diminishing the borders of their bodies, solidifying them into a single shape with no blatant erotic overtones. We witness simultaneously, in this sketch, the gradual fading of eroticism and the beginnings of fluidity - a fluidity that even more powerfully permeates the next drawing we will look at, Brutal Despotism (below).
This sketch marks a significant departure away from detail for Rodin. In the remainder of the drawings we will examine, his contour line gradually becomes so loose and inconsistent as to become almost irrelevant, and with this diminishing of detail, 
thus does the homoerotic element diminish as well. Brutal Despotism portrays two women, one apparently straddling the back of the other as if astride a horse, the other beneath the first, crawling on hands and knees towards the viewer. These figures are drawn with a light pencil outline, a line so faint that it almost gets lost in the pale peach-colored watercolor wash filling in the forms of both women. There is no shading in this drawing; the darkest areas are the two heads of hair, deep auburn dribbles on the paper. The wash of their skin is almost identical to the color of the paper, and the only line that separates the two bodies is the hair-thin line of the crawling woman’s curving back, almost too faint to see. Claudie Judrin recalls this dilemma of perception well: “When…the skin is rendered in a very pale flesh-tint which can hardly be distinguished from the colour of the paper, the eye is able to apprehend the division between the colours in some imperceptible manner” (Judrin, “Rodin’s Drawings” 19). Indeed, the separation of the bodies, which is much more subtle than in Temple of Love, is so delicate that if we blur our eyes and regard the drawing again, the two bodies melt together and we see only a strange, beige-colored shape. The potential ambiguity of this shape leaks eroticism away from the drawing: is that really one woman riding another? We have to look twice to be sure. The subtle eroticism of this sketch is a progression away from the explicitly erotic Temple of Love and Sapphic Couple. Why might Rodin’s drawings have lost their sexual charge over time in this way? As we take note of the increasing abstraction of the couples’ bodies, we begin to realize that while Rodin obviously enjoyed depicting lesbian couples in his drawings, he began to be less interested in their sexuality and more interested in the potential for artistic abstraction they offered.