Girl Sketches

It used to be a struggle for me to draw women. They'd always come out looking like men in drag. Probably because I'd just add lipstick and eyelashes to a face. Eventually I figured out rounder heads make characters appear more feminine, but that just led to an archetype. I wanted to be able to depict more differences between women than their hairstyles. So a while ago I did a series of sketches to improve my ability, and what better time to share them than International Women's Day?

Some drawings were referenced, some will be made up. This was the first batch I did and as you'll see through the rest of these, I mostly avoided the cliché of eyelashes and lipstick. I don't actually think there's anything wrong with doing that, I mean shit, women wear make-up... but I don't depict the lips and eyelashes on my male characters so personally I feel I should be able to depict girls without them too.

This last page is the one I like the most out of these head sketches, and that proves for me how important it is to regularly sketch.

Here I moved onto figures, using reference for most of them.

I have to admit, I'm really pleased with these. Practice is so important. I think the reason some artists may be averse to it is because we all want to make a good 'final image' rather than spend time and energy on smaller, unimportant things. But I'm probably prouder of these drawings than some of the bigger stuff I've done.

Also we might be averse to practice because it takes time away from playing games and shit.

Happy International Women's day! Let's end with a classic comic from The Infamous Five.

Infamous Comic #36

Here are the sketch and inks to the 36th installment of my webcomic The Infamous Five! Visit their website to read today's discussion: Women's Issues. You should probably read the comic before you read any more of this blog 'cos it'll ruin the joke otherwise. See you in a minute!

Welcome back! Did you even leave? Whatever.

This one took a little extra work, as I needed to draw a woman on the front of Ant's magazine. I could have just draw a pair of boobs and been done with it, but I wasn't sure if that was enough. Boobs would have been enough for Ant but I meant artistically, it would just look better if I drew a woman on the cover. Also I think that, even though Ant's dialogue in the comic makes it clear what he's looking at, it'd make the joke work better if you saw what he was looking at too.

Now the magazine was too small to draw a woman directly onto it so I drew them both separately on A4-sized documents and will share those drawings in full at some point. Yeah, I said them and those. I ended up drawing two naked ladies when I decided there should be one on the back cover too. I could have left it blank, it wouldn't have looked bad, but again I just thought it would look better and help the joke if there was just an abundance of naked ladies by the time we reached the last panel.

Okay, they're not entirely naked. I did draw them that way, but I realised it wasn't necessary. I'm not sure magazines even have boobs and bums on the covers. So I put them both in bikinis. And it's a good job I did, because I then remembered I even put that in the funking dialogue. "The swimsuit edition".

COME ON, GNAR.