The assignment was "draw a scene from a book". I chose the 2nd to last book I read (the last one being Hannibal) and it is a sci-fi novel called "The Real Story" by Stephen R. Donaldson. Anyone here read it? It's a basic, sorta pulp kind of sci-fi, focusing on 3 characters.

For this pic I chose the 2 characters who are central to the story: Angus Thermopyle and Morn Hyland. I basically depicted the beginning of the book... it opens with these 2 people waliking into a seedy space bar called Mallorys. One is this pudgy, greasy kinda lowlife guy(Thermopyle) But he's with this just GORGEOUS gal(Morn Hyland) All the heads in the bar turn. The big question: how did this lowlife guy manage to snag a babe like that???

Here's an excerpt from the novel, page 4:

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For them, the story was basically simple.

It began when Morn Hyland came into Mallorys with Angus Thermopyle.

Those two called attention to themselves because they obviously didn't belong together. Except for her ill-fitting and outdated shipsuit, which she must have scrounged from someone else's locker, she was gorgeous, with a body that made drunks groan in lost yearning and a pale, delicate beauty of face that twisted dreamers' hearts. In contrast, he was dark and disreputable, probably the most disreputable man who still had docking rights at the station. His swarthy features were broad and stretched, a frog-face with stiff whiskers and streaks of grease. Between his powerful arms and scrawny legs, his middle bulged like a tire, inflated with bile and malice.

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?About the guy...hmmm, I wasn't trying to depict anybody in real life, never even realized the resemblance! I've never really drawn...men of expanded girth... much in the past, so getting this sketch to look the way I wanted it was a bit of a challenge. I should've made him larger & shorter, with more unkempt hair. Ah well.

Glad you noticed the body poses & expressions, I TOTALLY wanted that effect, so I'm happy you mentioned it. You totally nailed it with what I wanted the picture to depict. As for feet, the main reason I "avoided" them? Ran out of paper at the bottom. I drew this on 8½ x11 paper. But also, when I roughed out the composition, I purposely cropped it there. To show their full bodies would have taken away from the impact of their faces & poses because the camera shot would be "pulled out" too much, IMO. I can draw feet alright, about as "well" as I draw anything else, depending on your opinions of my drawing ability. I know that some artists avoid drawing feet because they can't do them. But for me, it just makes more of an impact sometimes when cropping the figure either above or below the kneecaps.