In the interest of learning to draw women better (something I freely confess I stink at) I borrowed some Shojo manga from you-know-who and drew a bunch of pictures (more or less) from some of the more shocking panels. My theory was that since shojo is pictures of women drawn by women for women, it would probably capture that feminine essence that I seem to be having so much difficulty with.
Not to make everyone slap themselves in the face and say "Well...uh, yeah. Anyone could have told you that." but here is what I've figured out. Focusing on the eyes and mouth and putting a lot of detail into those areas seems to make things more feminine. Shading around the teeth makes the lips look bigger and (I guess) more feminine. Lips should always be drawn, even if they're thin. Drawing the nostrils but not the bridge of the nose helps gloss over the face and reduce the fidelity of the parts of the face other than the mouth and eyes. I had originally thought that a rounder face and rounder angles probably was a more feminine thing, but I don't think that's true now. The face on the left in the picture above is quite long and horsey-faced, but still quite feminine. You can also obscure fairly large portions of face with hair, which is pretty good for shaping a head and putting focus onto the eyes and mouth. I figured out some other stuff; I think, but you'd have to ask my drawing hand and not my brain. I guess that's really the important bit, so whether I knew this stuff in my brain or not...if my hand doesn't know what to tell the pencil it doesn't make much difference.
Differences in style aside, I think these are good points to note. Now I should just try to apply this to my own stuff instead of being a copycat. I have to admit though, a few more copies would probably teach me a lot. I should do both. Oh yeah, and until my next post, here is some DORAMA! ROMANSU! RABU!
hahahaha...sorry, couldn't resist.
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