I'm not sure - since I wasn't as scrupulous about dating my drawings back then as I am now - but this might just be the first nude Tetsuko I'd ever attempted. It certainly looks like one of my earlier drawings, ne? Look at how big her head is in comparison to her body!

This comes during the time (as I've detailed in other commentary) when I hadn't quite nailed Tet-chan's design down. It's about 90% there, but I don't think I'd decided yet what hairstyle she'd wear (other than that it would be long and blonde). And she's still wearing that late-'80's/early-'90's headband that I thought at the time would be her trademark.

This was a difficult scan to clean up, mostly because I'd drawn it on the back of a sheet of paper taken out of a frame (I don't know what to call it; when you buy a frame in a store, it's got a sheet of paper in it that tells you the style, size, manufacturer, etc. I guess it's a "frame insert".) Anyway, the printing bled through the back, resulting in a "dirty" scan. I suppose with a little more twiddling and tweaking I could get a cleaner scan, but I didn't want to lose the subtlety of the line quality.

(Why was this drawn on the back of a frame insert? Well, it was a habit I had of doodling on the backs of these sheets at the caricature stand I worked at in one of the Disney World hotels, waaay back in the late '80's/early '90's. It's rather scary now that I think about it, that I was brave enough to attempt a nude drawing at work! But that stand wasn't as "exposed" as the one I'm at now, and drawings could be worked on more discreetly there. Indeed, a lot of the drawings (and writing) I did during that time were done between customers at work, on the backs of frame inserts.)

Click the pic to open the full-size illustration (in a new window).

© 2006 David C. Matthews