Adventures In Drawing Women

Yeah, it's been a good while since I've written anything and there's a valid reason to that, I'm father, have been ever since April so free time is quickly vanishing that and I'm trying to spend more time with my family and overall I'm in kinda of a weird place in life right, we'll get to that. That being said previously I've written an article about my inability to draw women, consider this a follow up to said article as I've (at least in my estimation) greatly improved on my ability to draw women. So here's some things I've discovered on my adventures in drawing women...

*Reader Discretion Advised*

For starters what has helped me greatly in drawing nudes. Yes, nudes, especially with women! No, not because I'm a pervert (not entirely, anyway) but because I have a problem with...what I call "boob mechanics". What I mean by "boob mechanics" is that I have a hard time figuring out where the boobs are not if I don't know where they are...if that makes any sense...allow me to explain:

As you can see the T-shirt Shae Riley a.k.a The Blood King (yes, King, see Deviantart for explanation) is wearing now contours her body and breasts perfectly mostly because I can see now where her hips are and where a t-shirt would crease and fold around breasts. Anyways, I've been drawing a ton of nudes in various poses, as the poses will not only help me advance in shadowing, it'll help advance in dynamic action. Anyways, drawing nudes and then adding the clothes later is a method I learned from probably one of my favorite artists Jago Dijuba.

Jago draws clothed and nude versions of about 90% of his work and when he does you can really see the contrast between where certain parts are and are not.  The benefits of drawing digitally are obviously being able to layer sections of the art piece and in doing so I don't have to be 100% committed to certain sections of it. Likewise if I screw up, going back isn't as difficult as it is with pencil & paper. You'd think something like that will make me lazy as an artist but it's actually allowed me to try new things, things that I (personally) wouldn't be able to achieve with pencil & paper. I'm talking about shading, shadowing, blending colors and so on. So with all these new skills and things I'm learning I'm actually MORE involved in drawing than I ever have been.

Granted, I still barely have time to draw but when I do I can be pretty meticulous now. Granted, shading, shadowing and color blend are things I should've learned in Art School but I never went to art school and every art class I've ever had was basically a free period to b.s. with my buddies, so these weren't skills I picked up over time, these are skills I'm just learning now. As such my shading will be pretty amatuer and I still haven't quite grasped how to make the colors as vibrant as I'd like, and I'm still working on trying to get that glossy look...ya know? But I'm still in the learning phase. I just took me drawing digitally for me to really get my handle on my art style. It blows me away that some people can do it with pencil, pen & markers.

Another one of my artistic heroes, JP Cortes, follow this guy on Instagram if you wanna see some AMAZING pin-ups

Still it's nice to see I'm coming into my own over here FINALLY after all these years, ESPECIALLY with women. I've been doing "okay" with women since I started drawing them a few years back in 2002 but NOW my women are actually starting to look like women and this means in the grand scheme of things I can ONLY GET BETTER!! I've got art posted on Deviantart now if you guys wanna see me progress. Hope you guys are doing well and I'll catch you guys later!!