One of my biggest weakness in Illustration is in drawing Women. There’s a lot of reasons for this. One major issue being when I was younger I was too embarrassed to draw women. I thought if I drew the female figure people would judge me as being a pervert. Today however as an adult I am not embarrassed and don’t care if people judge me. I have therefore decided to make a serious study to improve my abilities in this area. The famous saying goes; An artist that can draw beautiful women never goes hungry.
To get started on this endeavor I have decided to work through the classic Famous Artist Cartoon Course Lesson 7 Pretty Girls by commercial Cartoonist Joe King. The original famous artists correspondence courses were founded in the late 1940s by Norman Rockwell and Albert Dorn. I believe the original course consisted of 10 lessons with an addtional 14 lessons add at a later time. Each lesson was then to be completed by the student and sent in for critique by a professional. Today the courses are still under copy right by Cortina Learning International and available for purchase at the famous artist school website here.
The first page of the course begins with a half page type written introduction to drawing “the pretty girl.”
Here are some of the funnier quotes;
The pretty girl, the dame, the frail, the tomato, the cookie, the cutie is always welcome in a cartoon no matter how grotesque the rest of the characters may be.
In drawing a pretty girl, don’t be too skimpy with the bust or the thigh line. These can be accentuated without giving the drawing any suggestion of vulgarity.
Probably the best piece of advice given in this first part of the lesson is;
One well-known cartoonist who always said he couldn’t draw sexy or pretty girls became on of the top girl artist in the business simply by drawing one complete figure from pencil to ink each day for one year.
Here is my drawing from this first page. It is a free hand pencil drawing recreation I did of the original inked illustration by Joe King.
