I'll tumblr for ya

heysawbones:

I admit, I like to draw things that I find aesthetically appealing. I’m not above that.

That said, it’s important to me that a character is able to emote. When I’m drawing a guy, I usually know how to draw him emoting while still keeping the set of visual symbols that make the character attractive. If I only drew a ‘default’ anatomically correct face that couldn’t emote, I’d get bored. It would be easier, but, yeah. Very boring. I suspect other people looking at my work would feel the same way.

Illustrated women, on the other hand, often seem much more limited in their ability to “emote while being attractive”. Since our Western idea of what makes a woman attractive is much more limited than our idea of what makes a man attractive, we have been given a much more limited set of “attractive female” facial symbols to work with, than we have been given for men. It makes the prospect of drawing a woman really emoting daunting, challenging, and for some people, apparently not worth the effort. Since it’s so important to many illustrators that their females be attractive at ALL times, a lot of people don’t even bother with trying to give their women a little more… well, character.

I understand whya lot of illustrators shy away from drawing women making “crazy” faces. Yeah, it’s tough to do, especially if you’re concerned with maintaining aesthetic appeal. For me, as an illustrator, it’s worth the trouble.  I gotta say, looking at galleries and comic books full of women making the same two bedroom eyes/sweet smile faces is incredibly boring. And asinine. It might be worth it for you to learn how to draw women emoting, too.

I think sticking with the bedroom eyes status quo is lazy. And, it’s a copout. And, you can do better. Yes, you CAN learn to do it. The alternative is that your women are as boring as paste. They look so generic that they fade entirely into the background and stop even registering as “attractive” after a while, which defeats your point entirely, doesn’t it?

These are all taken from the same Nicki Minaj video. I hope someone out there finds them as inspiring and useful as I do.