Eventually Dusti Bongé's surrealist works shifted in subject matter. They became inhabited with unusual humanoid figures. This shift started occurring after the war during the late 1940s and lasted into the early 1950s, when her figures started become increasingly more like abstract forms. 

During this time she started doing more sketches of people in her sketchbooks. These studies are of a variety of characters, such as friends and family in relaxed postures, often seated, reading books, smoking, napping, or of other scenes like jazz musicians playing, or people dancing. And, although Dusti had never taken any art classes when she started her artistic career, she was aware of its various traditions, styles and genres such as history painting, portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. So, she understood the central role of studying the human form in any artist’s process of mastering their craft, especially the first two genres. She was also well aware of the various types of figure drawings artists practiced to hone their observational and graphic skills in depicting the human form. She practiced quick figure studies, many of them contour drawings and continuous line drawings

Simultaneously, alongside these sketches her surrealist work shifted in both form and content toward compositions filled with human-like figures, which she referred to as Keyhole People. The latter appear to be morphed versions of the contour figures. They are highly abstracted, surrealist, humanoid forms with exaggerated, often rather attenuated, proportions. 

Then, in the early 1950s,  Dusti decided to take studio classes at the 331 Chartres Street School in New Orleans. These classes comprised various studio settings including life drawing studio. Hence many of her sketches and drawings of that time are, once again, quick figure studies, that were clearly generated in life drawing sessions with a nude model, continually chaging poses. And, around this time, the Keyhole People become slightly more stylized. 

The Keyhole People are exceedingly enigmatic creatures, identifiable as “people” by the placement of one or two “eyes” or keyholes in what could be construed as their "heads." The figures are often placed together in small groups, sometimes in a beach-like scene with birds, fish or waves, other times in more vague backgrounds marked by swaths of color or varying patterns. The signature “keyholes” appear like white voids in otherwise colorful figures. As surrealist motifs they are testament to Dusti Bongé's unique vision.