someone reminded me of this magazine cover! i remember seeing it as a kid and it was stunning then, as it is now. the context of it is history now, and whatever political charge this had to me as a clueless child is about the same as it is now.
but this bear, so lovingly rendered. carefully shaded in what was probably colored pencil. delicately adorned in jewelry. red satin hugging her curves. this illustration upstages the news it is about so hard that i couldn't have recalled the text or even what magazine it was.
the artist is Carter Goodrich.
and that's why i'm a gay furry now
Saw these and said "This guy knows what's good" and I don't know precisely what I meant but I believe it
So I am confident this artist is not a furry but he nonetheless has drawn one of the finest pieces in the genre I think I've ever seen. And i think a lot of that comes from considering the character as an ANIMAL first. Like that character isn't a woman with a bear head. That is a BEAR first. She is ROUND and SOFT, big fluffy shaggy fur, big body. She has a wide, fluffy cheeked bear face. The human details are made to fit the bear shape, not vice versa, the breasts, her little hands, etc. The comedy of such a big bumbly bear in a beautiful delicate pose, her satin gown, the little gesture of her hand playing with her pearls, so seductive, so charming, oh! Who wouldn't fall in love!
It's exquisite.
A lot of furry art then was all built out of toons, the structure of toon animals - or off of pinup/comic art. So characters were either just kinda bean bodies with animal heads, or pinup lady bodies with animal heads. Maybe now a lot of that has shifted to more anime influence than western cartoons but it's still primarily human shapes. This isn't remotely like that, and for some reason feels so right to me, I respond so strongly to this.
I wanna start following this in my own art, doing a lot more to consider the shape of the critter first and how that can be used to make the character say more with their design.