Book Review: Drawing Beautiful Women: The Frank Cho Method

I've always enjoyed Frank Cho's art, his pen and ink drawings, the beautiful women, and the occasional visual humour. Drawing Beautiful Women is a wonderful artbook that has a bit of all those elements. The book's available in hardcover and paperback,

This is more like a making-of book that goes behind the scenes to look at how Cho creative process. The bulk of the book consist step-by-step process sketches that end with the finished artwork. You get to see how the sketches evolve, changes made and the final piece. The art is exceptionally beautiful, that goes without saying.

The six chapters included are Basic Anatomy, Figures in Motion, Ink, Painting, Ballpoint Pen Art and Storytelling.

As an instructional artbook, there are not a lot of instructions. These instructions are brief tips on anatomy and figure drawings, talking about proportion of features on the face and other parts of the woman body. Basically, you need to already know how to draw basic human figures beforehand to get the best out of the book, then take note of Cho's advice so that you can make your woman character more beautiful, or more woman-like. There are some humorous text throughout, e.g. "nipple can dial a rotary phone", "keep your GILF fantasies to yourself" etc.

I like the chapters that show the specific medium that Cho uses. He talks about the techniques, such as where to start inking first for the black and white ink drawings, and the tools he uses. When I see some of his line art, I thought of Bernie Wrightson's Frankestein and indeed Cho listed that as one of his influences, among other pen and ink masters like Franklin Booth and more.

The chapter on painting has information on the colour schemes Cho typically uses, two step by step demonstrations on using acrylic and watercolour with brief captions, and some of his huge work-in-progress unfinished paintings.

The chapter on ballpoint pen art is interesting as well showcasing elaborate hatching to create a style that evokes the feel of traditional technical pen hatching art but with the softness associated with pencil drawings.

The last few pages feature Cho's creator-owned character Jungle Queen to bring across the importance of storytelling. It's a sneak peek to his upcoming graphic novel.

Even though it's not a fully fledged instructional art book, it's still a highly recommended purchase because the art is fantastic.

Drawing Beautiful Women: The Frank Cho Method is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

There are other editions. This one is the Publishers edition with 16 bonus pages.

This is the Studio edition which is oversized. You can also pay a bit more for Frank Cho to sign it. Both the special editions are available at https://fleskpublications.com/flesksite/index.php?route=product/categor…

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