Once upon a time, my brother (who is also an artist) was looking through my sketchbook. He was enjoying my pictures of monsters and silly cartoon characters, but he had to stop and slightly mask a grimace. “I hate to say this, Mark, and no offense, but… you really need to work on your women. They’re really not… well, all that
attractive.”
I’m one of the few artists who will allow you to see some of my earlier lousy drawings, but here you go. I think he was probably talking about a drawing not unlike these:
At this point, I had two choices: I could (A) get angry and/or indignant, throw myself into a serious tantrum, and never ask his opinion again. Or I could (B) grow as an artist, by weighing the opinion he had offered as diplomatically as he was then able, and taking a careful, scrutinizing look at my work.
I went with choice B, and looked carefully at my attempt at an attractive woman.
Hmm… (Sigh.)
As much as I hated to admit he was right, well… he was right. My women needed some serious work.
So, I practiced. I looked at photos, and tried to figure out and analyze what unique, individual features made each woman attrac- tive. I tried to inject that into my designs. Here are some of the observations I collected from my own opinions regarding feminine physical charm, and from other artists over the years.
Overall, when drawing women, again make sure the hips are wider than the shoulders, which are generally more soft and rounded than her masculine counterpart’s. The neck also has a tendency to be more slender, and the hands are longer and more graceful.
One of the foremost features to be considered is the face. And since the eyes are, as they say, the “windows to the soul,” that might be as good a place as any to start. I have a tendency to draw the eyes on women larger than I do on men. When possible, I like to draw the iris as a separate shape from the pupil. Normally the iris, or colored part of the eye, is the first thing to be lost during the simplification process of caricature. Otherwise, the larger the pupil, the more alert (and sometimes even the younger) the character.
Keep the eyelashes as a single, thick and thin line. Think how mascara thickens the eyelashes and tends to clump them together. Ask yourself, how often can you count individual eyelashes when standing three feet away from someone? Avoid drawing the little cartoon eyelashes whenever possible, except perhaps for a moment of comic effect.
For a more attractive woman, also put as little detail in drawing their noses as possible. As weird as it sounds, look at those fashion commercials, when they flood a model’s face with light, or when they’re interviewing an aging model/actress. They’ll either
overlight or soften and even blur the picture so those wrinkles and detail lines disappear. One of the first things to go is the nose. Don’t believe me? Look at those two foundations of feminine teen beauty (well, in the cartoon kingdom, anyway), Betty and Veronica. Find a picture of either one and look at their noses. Not only are they missing the bridges to their noses, they don’t even have nostrils. They just have a little right triangle, a triangle set on its side. In other words, less is more!
The same basic rule for drawing eyelashes applies similarly to drawing hair. As one of my first drawing instructors told me, avoid drawing the individual hairs, and instead approach hair as a mass. Because even though it is composed of those tiny fine lines, gravity (and air, especially wind) tends to treat hair more as a mass, so we as artists should do the same.
For my first art show, the 1988 Atlanta Fantasy Fair, I had done a number of drawings, mostly in pencil (not the best recommenda- tion for an art show, especially as light as some of them were). One in particular I recall was a mermaid, or rather a variation I called a Mermayden. Instead of her body tapering to a single fish tail, she had two legs (and knees) like most human females, but instead of feet she had fins, beginning pretty much at her calves.
In any case, another artist was kind enough to offer me a few words of advice on drawing female hands. Besides keeping the fin- gers relatively long and slender, it’s best to avoid drawing all the fingers clumped together (a fist would be the obvious, inescapable exception); otherwise the hand is in danger of looking too massive. Instead, cluster them together in groups of two or three.
Legs are widest at the thighs, tapering down to the knees, flar- ing out again slightly at the calves, and then down again to the ankles.
Naturally, all these general guidelines for drawing men and women are just that… general guidelines.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve also found that the general appearance of women I find attractive has changed as well. When I was a teen- ager, I was attracted to the “Morticia Addams” types. Of course I’ve always been attracted to brunettes, but when I was younger, they were taller and more slender. Phoebe Cates and Jennifer Connelly were (and still are, at the time of this writing) probably the best live-action examples.
I’ve noticed in the past 10 years or so, however, that I like women who are described as a little “curvier.” Look at the Frank Frazetta women from the 1970s, on the covers of Vampirella and those old Conan the Barbarian novel covers.
Some people may get “wowed” by Jessica Rabbit, but I think if we ground the female character with just a bit more realism, we’re likely to be a bit more successful. My favorite female cartoon lead in the past few years was (from the vastly underrated Road to El
Dorado), the native girl Chel. Likewise, look at Princess Elinore in
Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards for another example of an attractive female with some curves.
A woman doesn’t have to be a total walking stick figure to turn heads, folks!
I’m probably one of the few people involved in the media who will tell you this: Just because idealized men and women are por- trayed physically a certain way in popular entertainment doesn’t mean that’s the way we’re supposed to look. Remember, animation is largely a fantasy world.
If the famed Barbie doll were a real woman, and walking down the street, she would get more than a few casual glances. Because if a human female were actually as tall proportionately as that popu- lar toy, which is regrettably given to little girls around the world at an impressionable age, she would be seven feet tall.