I painted this back in November 2011. It’s my original pin-up gal, Catherine dressed as a Dominatrix and playing jump rope with Albino Grimby (the stuffed rabbit looking thing). As you can see, she might be a Dom, but hardly a serious one.
You can see a larger version on my deviantArt site. Below is the original sketch tinted blue so I could do the inks. I drew this in my sketchpad. BTW, if you’re looking for a good sketchbook to use, I really like the Robert Bateman sketchpads and I usually get the 11in. x 14in. ones. I like the paper quality — it’s pretty sturdy so it can hold up to a lot of erasing. The paper doesn’t warp and it doesn’t really bleed. Really nice sketchbook. Just google it and you can buy it online.
For this drawing, I remember a great deal of time was spent trying to get her high heel boots correct. I’m not 100% sure if I succeeded, but it looks correct. The legs seem like they’re in proportion. I didn’t jump rope much as a kid, and I’m absolutely terrible at it — I found that out when I did some jump roping in a cardio class — but I do know that jumping rope like that, with your legs kicked up behind you, is not really the way to go if you want to speedily jump over the rope. Also, probably not recommended that you do this all dolled up in leather dominatrix gear and stiletto boots, but that’s why it’s a pin-up. A goofy one at that.
This inking and sketch stayed pretty much the same. I went a bit thicker around the hat and the whip. I probably should have given it a bit more motion, but I’m not that adept at inking just yet. I’m still learning, but this was one of the milestones on my road to getting better. The emblem was the major thing that got touched up. For the sketch I phoned it in. To get all the minute details would be difficult, and since I knew I’d probably handle the final drawing on a computer, I could fudge it and fix it later. Also, I’ve done the Great Seal emblem before in other drawings of her so I actually have the whole thing done up in vectors that I can quickly rasterize. The tricky part was to angle and skew it to fit the perspective of her hat. Once again, not perfect, but I managed to get the job done and then I re-inked it since the line quality diminished as I skewed and squashed the thing.
Here’s a close up of the Great Seal.
In color:
I did try to adjust it for a 3/4 view. It’s by no means perfect, but I’m fairly happy the way it turned out. Her hair though is another story. I actually don’t like it at all. The lines and the way it’s painted just don’t jive together. It looks more painted than it should for something that’s obviously drawn as a bunch of wispy clumps. I really should have shaded the tips and left out all the minute strides of highlight and shade. It could be done a lot simpler and take less time. With the drawings I did after this, that was how I began to shade hair.
Below is a close up of Albino Grimby, my mascot character:
Just for fun, here’s an older version of her I did in 2010. Catherine dates back to something crazy like the year 2000. I didn’t conceive of her as a dominatrix. As with Jessica Rabbit, she’s not naughty, just drawn that way.
Here’s a more comprehensive view of her history as a piece of art done by me throughout the years. In this odd way, because I repainted her time and time again, she’s become this milestone marker in the evolution of my art ability. When you look at them side by side you can see all of the little tweaks I made over the years. I didn’t like her cap before. I had reference of a military cap and vectorized the emblem from it. I didn’t even know it was called the Great Seal until later on. It just looked cool. I still like the 2006 version. This was back when I was trying to do more painterly style pieces, but it was time consuming and I fell out of doing art for a while after it. The main issue I have with the 2006 version is that her boobs look like a shelf, but that’s based on the original sketch. I also dropped the riding crop in her hand. When I went to redo it, it seemed cheesy, so out it went.
I originally posted “Jump Rope” as a sketch on this blog. You can find “Jump Rope!” right here. Thanks for viewing!
After a lot of flipping back and forth, correcting skewed parts of the image, correcting others, I think this took about a week, I had a final inking that was fairly decent.
