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The last time I did figure drawing was last semester. Depressing I know. If you are familiar with figure drawing, you would know that it is usually of just the figure.

The story behind this is that I was at a friend’s place and I started to flip through this Japanese magazine ViVi. I didn’t get too far into it to notice the sickening amount of pages that were devoted to teaching girls how to dress and look: cute with sickeningly cute poses. It made the American teen magazines look relatively tame. Or at least there isn’t  such a huge volume of that stuff in American magazines as it is usually balanced out with some celeb stuff. But anyways, I started doing gesture drawings and I came across this 1 page spread of this girl.

A ridiculous pose + ridiculous facial expression + ridiculous outfit = a ridiculous magazine.

I had to draw her. Sounds funny since I was repulsed so much, but perhaps I wanted to draw her just for the fact that I found her ridiculous. It began as a rough exercise to see if I could still draw the figure (since I only had a little bit larger than a 8.5×11” sketchbook, pencils and a smudge stick), but I liked how it was going, and it became like this.

Typical of me drawing the figure, I didn’t concentrate on the face, since it then draws attention away from the figure and to the face in my opinion, and because I know I can draw faces, but the exploration is done with the figure. Yet, just drawing her open mouth fitted to go with her silly pose and outfit in a silly magazine.

The opposite of this page is a failed red pastel drawing, so that accounts for the faint red hue on it.