Monday, March 9, 2009

Pregnant Nude

*Note: I'm shooting for Monday posts instead of Wednesday.

This week's offerings are some sketches and a study for a spec project I was working on a while back. Spec meaning that I do the illustration and then hope someone is willing to buy it, and honestly this is not a very wise business move. In this case it was for an online illustrated literary magazine, which has more or less ceased publication. Basically it worked like this: they would put up very short stories, seriously like 50 words or less, and anyone who wished to, was welcome to submit art to illustrate any story that inspired them. If they liked your work they would publish it with the story. Well, it took me way too long to get to the final version, and another artist got her's accepted before I even got mine finished, so that was that. Anyway, I recently ran across this in my crap pile, and decided to add some inked lines, well lo and behold, it came out pretty nice for a sketch. I've been working on my portfolio lately, so a similar finished piece might just make it in there.

Oh, I forgot to mention, the subject of the story was a young woman reminiscing about a time shortly before giving birth to her first child, and how she took her clothes off and looked at her nude pregnant body in the mirror and how beautiful she felt. Some might be offended, or even disgusted by such an image, or even the mere thought, and that really is a sad thing. Because there is something truly magnificent about the pregnant form, perhaps in part because it is such a rarity, I mean for each individual woman, sometimes only once in her lifetime. Then again, not that long ago that the censors would not allow the word pregnant to be spoken on television.




Pregnant Nude watercolor study with ink.


Pregnant Nude 1 sketch on brown paper with China White highlights.


Pregnant Nude 2 sketch on brown paper with China White highlights.

2 comments:

Be Creative Books said...

Hi Robert! i like those pieces, my favorite is the sketch 2, very nice!

Robert said...

Thank you kindly, Eugenio.