I have known about the Gold Digger Swimsuit Issues and Gold Digger Annuals for sometime now, but I had never submitted anything to them before because during the time of the deadlines my heart was on something else or I forgot about when the deadline was entirely. You see, when I am going to draw something my heart must be in it or it becomes more of a chore instead of a recreational activity. And if the drawing is done as a chore than it won't be my best work.
I had been out of the whole Fred Perry fan club scene for some time now and had moved more towards drawing "furry" style characters, so it looked as if I wasn't going to be submitting anything to the swimsuit annual this year either. I had made friends with a furry artist, Sarah Wheeler, at about this time and was taking tips and pointers from her as to how I could improve my work. One of the things I had noticed about her is that she had a long list of times her artwork had been published in comics and magazines and my list of times was only one item long. Knowing how important it is to have published works to show in your artwork portfolio I went to work on finding ways to get my artwork spread around. The most obvious way: Antarctic Press's Gold Digger Swimsuit Issue 2002.
I immediately went to work on figuring out what to draw. It would have to be both something that would be fun for me to draw and would have to have a chance at getting published. The obvious choice of a Gold Digger character for me to draw would have been Britanny Diggers. I had drawn her more times than any other character, and her and Shiela were the two main reasons why I bought the comic in the first place. Some problems arose with drawing Britanny however. First of all, she was a central character. Every little Gold Digger fanatic (who wasn't already drawing Brianna) was going to draw Britanny, and that meant more competition for myself. The second reason why I was hesitant to draw Britanny was because her character was falling out of favor with me. There is only so much of a super-consumering greedy selfish over-confident personallity a guy can take, despite how sexy a character is "drawn." And besides, I was getting a little sick of comic characters with DDD chest sizes. Even though nobody will believe me when I say this, most of the characters that I have designed are supposed to be somewhere around a C cup-size. That's more than enough for me.
So I decided to write-out Britanny Diggers as an option for the subject of my submission. I then started to flip through the Gold Digger comics for ideas. In the fourth trade paperback I re-discovered a character that, about a year ago, was on my have-to-draw-list. That character was one of the few other were-cheetahs besides Britanny in the Gold Digger universe, had a much nicer kinder personality, and had a much more modest build. This character was Cyan, Britanny's long dead mother. A know what you're thinking, "Her mother! But she must be old and wrinkley!" That's not the case, however. Cyan wasn't much older than Britanny when she died leaving her a very attractive character to draw. Plus, she has appeared alive in the comic through the use of Seance's aura powers. The best part though is that I had really wanted to draw this character for some time and now I finally had an excuse to do it. And Cyan is such an obscure character in the comic I would probably be the only one drawing her in the whole Gold Digger fandom world!
I instantly formed an image in my mind about what the tropical swimsuit theme would look like. I got out the scratch paper and started to draw a couple layout sketches. The first few I didn't like, but I eventually came up winner. Immediately I went to work on it. I did the rough work with a .05mm mechanical pencil with 5H lead. I then went over it with .05mm mechanical pencil loaded with 6B lead. I used to do all of my drawings that way, but now I have dropped that method to use non-photo blue pencils and pigment ink pens instead. This drawing of Cyan is the last one to use my "old" method. To catch the mood of the scene I had The Beach Boys' song "Kokomo" playing in the background the entire time I was drawing. I wanted to add something personal to the drawing, some special extra little unique identifier in case this drawing did get published, so I drew Cyan wearing a silver fish necklace with a Amber gemstone in it. I gave that exact same necklace to a girl who was a friend of mine as a souvenir when we both went on spring break vacations on opposite ends of the world.
I like putting photograph backgrounds in my drawings, but I had to take special care to find a suitable one that was public domain to use because it had the possibility of being published and wasn't just for myself. Many of my friends thought it was a mistake putting a photo background into the drawing and perhaps it was since it got didn't get published in the swimsuit issue, but I still love the way it turned out. I guess there was a ton of submissions for the swimsuit issue this year and only a few could be chosen, but I have been told that they are creating an "End of Summer Special" issue to display some of the overflow submissions. So this lovely drawing of Cyan may be published yet. I hope it does because I would really love the rest of the world to see that this "ghost" of the Gold Digger world still has some fire burning within.
The pencil work was done on 80lb. Strathmore meduim-surface drawing paper with a .05mm mechanical pencil loaded with 5H lead.. I then went over it with a .05mm mechanical pencil loaded with 6B lead. It was than cleaned up and darkened in Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7.02. I then printed it out on standard Georgia-Pacific FAX/Copy paper and colored it with Crayola colored pencils. The lettering and photograph was added with Paint Shop Pro 7.02.
All text and original multimedia is © 2002 Daniel Keller. All other information is copyrighted by their respective owners.