Cover Me

I spent some time backing up my downloaded music files and I had to put together some cover art (pictured) for the discs - I’m wired that way.

Without strong themes to inform the artwork, I fell back on a standard advertising idea: use a pretty girl. The photos are from various mailers and newspaper inserts like J. C. Penny and Kohls.


I was once encouraged to put together a “How to Draw Pretty Girls” book. I may not ever do that book since I think there are plenty of such books out there. Flipping through a few, I've failed to find where the authors actually define what a “pretty girl” is. Beauty, they say, is subjective. True.

Leading me to my small contribution to the curriculum: use the anonymous models in weekly mailers and newspaper inserts as a reference for what defines a pretty girl.

Contemporary standards of beauty are being defined a redefined constantly, yearly, seasonally, some times by the week.

Celebrities are a misleading gauge of those standards, because some are the canvas for an ever changing line-up of stylists, some would sacrifice beauty to stand out, but mostly because it's so difficult to separate the personality from the image.

1) Department store advertisements are by nature, aimed at a mass audience, and portray an attainable standard of beauty.

2) The ads are up to date.

3) The ads are cheap, usually free.

4) The ads are mutli-racial, more true now than even five years ago.

And if you can’t find a pretty girl in those ads, then I would posit that you are drawing for a different audience, and I, unfortunately, have no further advice for you.