Otis Sweat

I wrote a post the other day about things that crossed my personal line – stuff that I've seen on the net, but that I personally would not draw. As a follow-up, I wanted to write something about things I would be willing to do, but that no one else seemed to be doing.

Art courtesy cavmag.com

I was going to accompany it with a classic catfight illustration by Otis Sweat, which appeared in either Cavalier or Nugget back in the pre-Internet era. But I have apparently lost that file, and I can't find it on the web, either. (Meanwhile, here's another one, not quite as kinky.)

But in searching for that art, I discovered some interesting things. I had not seen any new Otis Sweat art in years, but he's still out there creating. And maybe everyone already knew this, but Otis Sweat is apparently his real name, not a pseudonym. Seriously, you couldn't make up a better name than that. It has a lot more cachet than, for example, 'Cameroon Wildebeest, Jr.'

I also discovered that in addition to his vast ouevre of sex art, he's done editorial illustration for the Miami Herald and the Washington Post. This is interesting to me because, as I've mentioned previously, I adopted the 'Wildebeest' pseudonym primarily to protect my 'mainstream' art/marketing/media career. But Sweat has apparently juggled sex art and 'mainstream' art successfully.

He's another of those guys who make me wonder why I even bother to do this stuff. He's Clapton, and I'm a teenager strumming 'Kumbaya'. I love what he does with skin tones, and it's influenced the way I draw them. At one point, years ago, I was consciously mimicking Sweat's handling of skin tones and highlights.

Sweat's work has an almost hyperrealistic quality at first glance. After you look at it for a few minutes, though, you notice that what he was doing in his Dugent Publishing days, at least, actually bordered on caricature, and it was this careful exaggeration that created the sense of hyperrealism. This is a technique he shares with Neal Adams, and, to some extent, Norman Rockwell. (Yes, I'm seriously comparing Norman Rockwell and Otis Sweat. It's about time somebody did.)