Earlier in my career the female face and figure was not my forte – I was much more comfortable drawing guys and even more comfortable and adept at drawing vehicles and hardware than either gender. All that changed in my mid-to-late thirties, which I attribute to living with my beautiful Saxon Princess – inspiration like that couldn’t help but improve those skills.
So here is the dilemma: do I always want to draw my female characters as beauty queens – or as we refer to them in the studio “slinky women”? One school of thought pushes for a wider range of faces and figures or as one former student said ‘Women that don’t look like they have “Mattel” stamped on their a**”… but every time I tone down the glitz I get negative feedback from somewhere.
Up to this point as I have been working on the Gun Kingdoms 3 I’ve following the “slinky women edict” but for this figure I went with someone more true-to-life. Actually, she is based on a real person – a teacher from my high school. I didn’t have much in the way of reference ( just an old yearbook picture) but I think I captured the basic look. She’s wearing a diving suit so there were plenty of ways I could have vamped her up but I kept everything fairly utilitarian.