Lovely Lenten Ladies, 1 and 2

[tealin]

I recently had to throw together a sampling of my work at short notice (it's always at short notice, isn't it?) and in trying to populate pages with non-work sketches from the past year, it became blisteringly apparent to me that I hardly draw any women at all.


Granted, a lot of this has to do with my recent inspiration being exclusively male polar explorers ... but those aside, it made me wonder. It's not like I can't draw women,* or even that I don't like female characters, but for some reason they hardly turn up in my sketchbook. Why? A couple days' musing landed on three non-exclusive theories:
*though I readily admit I struggle with 'glamour'

1. Quite simply, the gender ratio in awesome characters is pathetically skewed in favour of male. You just don't get female Sherlocks, Moist von Lipwigs, or Herbert Wests. This may or may not have something to do with eccentricity being outwardly expressed predominantly in men; I leave that up to the sociologists.

2. Those female characters who are awesome tend to be awesome in a verbal way, and so are less interesting to draw. (This is the same reason why there isn't much Fred & George in my Potter art: great dialogue just becomes an open mouth when illustrated. Very boring.) The number of female characters who are inspiring intellectually and actually do stuff worth drawing are very very few.

3. I just don't get girls.* I find it very hard to crawl inside their heads enough to make a drawing from the inside out – never mind in real life, where I don't even get to read the internal monologue that an author has thoughtfully provided.
*This is, of course, dismissively binary; I tend to 'get' my fellow fringettes, the unfeminine feminine, which consist mainly of geek girls and Pratchett females, but we are by far in the minority.

So in an effort to redress the imbalance, I have dedicated this Lent to Lovely Ladies (not necessarily of the Les Mis variety). And in the interest of skill-building and balance, I shall endeavour not simply to draw another drawing of Emilia every day, even though she rocks so hard I could give it a shot.

Here are the first two Lovely Lenten Ladies:

       
Fig. 1: If my roommate's cat were human;    Fig. 2: Easy shortcut to glamour: Make it Edwardian!

Comments

[tealin]

P.S. In all honesty when I was writing this and trying to think of non-Pratchett female characters I liked drawing, Dead Isle was literally the only thing that came to mind. The Aboriginal doctor is great too! I want to draw more of her. By which I mean 'any.' Do you know any good sources for photo reference of Aboriginies? They have a very distinctive facial structure and internet searches have been less than fruitful.

[copperbadge]

I've found "native australian" on GIS turns up some good stuff, but you're right, it's not exactly bountiful. You might check the National Geographic stock images site? Or possibly some anthropology websites of some kind...