Don't...Click...'Anthro'.

As a lot of my regular’s know, I like to draw.

That’s not to say I’m a particularly good artist. In fact, I think my skill level is best summed up by my response to the check-out girl at the store when I bought a new sketchpad, pencils and a new eraser:

“Hey, wow! Are you an Artist?”

“Ummmm….(Long pause)…No. But I’d like to be.”

Now, as I’ve said in a previous post, the hardest thing in the world to draw is women. The problem is that every human being on the planet sees other human beings every day. If something is just slightly off, the finished drawing just doesn’t look right.

A lot of the time, you can’t even put your finger on exactly what’s wrong with the drawing…you just know something’s wrong.

Drawing men, on the other hand, is fairly easy. I’m trying to draw in a style halfway between comic book style and realism (look at any Ultimate X-Men comic to see what I’m shooting for). Men in this style are all straight lines and hard angles, and once you’ve learned the proportions, it’s pretty hard to mess up. With guys if you make the ribcage or shoulders too wide, you’ve just drawn a super-hero.

Sticking with X-Men, look at the massive difference between characters such as Xavier, Colossus, Night-Crawler and Juggernaut. Wildly different body shapes, but none of them look ‘wrong’.

Women, on the other hand, are all curves and soft lines. Unless you get their proportions and perspective exactly right, they just look deformed. Women are very hard to draw.

So I did what anyone would do. I practiced.

Then, a few nights ago, I found a website called ‘deviantart.com’. It’s essentially an art-showcase/learning site for everything from writing, to photography to cartooning to oil painting. There are some truly great artists on there (both amateur and professional), so I thought I could benefit from a bit of professional advice.

I joined up, and posted a couple of pieces I’d done that week.

It was only a couple days later I realized I’d posted only pictures of women. One in rather a ‘provocative’ pose, and another loosely based on a video-game character whose clothes are not exactly what you’d call ‘baggy’.

All I’m going to say is when you’re trying to get the anatomy of a drawing right and try searching the internet for pictures to copy….I challenge you to find one that isn’t even slightly ‘provocative’.

So I got a little worried. My main thought was “Uh-oh…everyone’s going to think I’m a pervert.”

Now let me be perfectly clear. Every drawing I’ve done has clothes. There’s no actual nakedness, but my online portfolio consists entirely of pictures of women in tight fitting garments.

Also, the way I learn anything is to focus entirely on a particular area until I have it down. (For example, when I was learning guitar I focused entirely on learning all the chords before I moved onto soloing etc)…so at least for the next few months, my portfolio is going to consist entirely of drawings of women.

Then I browsed the site, and realized I didn’t really have to worry.

You see, you can browse that site by art-type and subject. For example, Digital art and cartoons, or oil painting and landscapes. In fact, it’s the main reason I joined that site because many good artists post not only the final picture, but the preliminary sketches, then the inks, basically every step along the way.

You don’t just see the picture, but also how it was drawn. It lead me to a good many ‘Ah-HA!’ moments, where you realize “Ahhhh! THAT’s how you do that!”

So I was browsing, and found a category called ‘Anthro’.

Here’s my thought processes on what happened.

“Anthro? What’s anthro? That’s a new one on me! I’ll just take a look”

(Click)

“ARRRRRGGHHH!!! MY EYES!!!!! I FEEL DIRTY!!! GET THE BLEACH, THE WIRE WOOL AND GET TO THE SHOWER!!!!!”

Let me explain what ‘anthro’ is.

This is where people draw animals, but in a human type way. The first picture I was ‘treated’ to was a picture of a fox (and I don’t mean in the way you’d look at a sexy lady and say ‘She’s a fox’, I mean an actual fox), only with a very human body, size DD boobs, in full lingerie and thigh-boots.

I actually threw up in my mouth a little. It looked like the result of an unholy union between a common-or-garden fox and Paris Hilton.

…and to think I was worried about coming across as a pervert. I’m drawing clothed women, while apparently hundreds of people like to draw the Triple X version of “Chip ‘n’ Dale’s Rescue Rangers”.

Anyway, if you’re interested in seeing my latest drawing, the link is

http://paulius1981.deviantart.com/

The page is pop-up free, so take a look. (I'm especially proud of my drawing of Storm from X-Men.

For those that are interested, that pic was drawn entirely on the computer.

Also, deviantart.com is great if you’ve got a bit of time to kill. Just don’t look under ‘Anthro’.