Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Tinkerbell’s Hairy Vagina.

Well, today I discovered I have two new diseases: Can'tleaveitthefuckalone-itis and Don'tquitwhileyou'reahead-osis.

Regular readers will know that I've been drawing again recently, and I finished the 'fairy' piece a few hours ago (I'll post it later if I remember).

For me, there are two ways a drawing is born…with difficulty or with a lot of difficulty. Suprisingly, I breezed through the preliminary stages of this drawing and had almost no problems at all, which should have forewarned me that inking was going to be a bitch…but it didn't, and I suffered for it.

I drew the pose, a semi-tricky one with a bit of foreshortening (that I usually suck at) and achieved moderate success. I scanned it, blew it up a little and then transferred it to Bristol board with my lightbox, which is also usually a little tricky, but again, I had no problems.

In fact, I inked the figure, added the fiddly bits of detail and had zero problems…then about an hour after I'd 'finished' the drawing, I do what I always do…approach it again, spot something I don't like, then dick with it until I almost ruin the picture and wish I'd just left it the fuck alone.

For example, as I discussed in my last post, I dressed the character in an outfit that is a hybrid of lots of different references. One of the things I looked at was ballerinas, and you know how ballerinas wear a leotard type thing with some form of skirt that is purely for show and not really there to cover anything? Well, I used a form of that…only returning to the picture, I noticed it might look a lot better if I made the 'underwear' part black to match some of the rest of the outfit….so I did.

I looked at it. My stepson Frank looked at it…and we both agreed that instead of looking like black lacy material, it looked like the poor fairy was inadvertently showing off her 'lady garden'. I covered it with process white, and re-drew in the leotard in white…only this time I made a line a little too thick and placed it off center, which meant she'd just gone from seventies playboy style and had given herself a Brazilian.

Luckily, I got that fixed, but then decided I didn't like her mouth. She was just a bit too Angelina Jolie and not quite enough Tinkerbell. So instead of blotting out the lips with process white and then sketching in her new lips with pencil first, I went straight for the ink-stick. Firstly they were way too high and made her look like she had the world's biggest chin, then they were off center. Finally, I got them somewhat right, although now she does have 'full lips' thanks to them being raised off the paper by three coats of process white.

I do this every time. I never 'finish' a piece, I just force myself to stop dicking with it before I ruin it any more.

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