Darn you for making me think this early in the morning!! 🙂
For me (and maybe for a few others in this forum), it really is two questions, according to whether we’re talking real or fantasy. (And as I’ve been composing my reply here, I find it hard to separate the specific question of body fat from
Fantasy: as an artist, I can idealize and stylize the women I draw until she’s the exact fulfillment of whatever dream of ultimate (not always ideal) feminine pulchritude I happen to be trying to express, even if it’s impossible to see this kind of woman in real life. To use my own characters as examples: although there are times when the more "realistic" build and proportions of Satin Steele are more appealing, more often than not Tetsuko stands as the visual realization of my ultimate fantasy woman: tall, long blonde hair, cute Kim Kilper-ish face, massively muscular with a level of definition and vascularity that suggests she’s only a couple of weeks away from contest-ready, yet with incredibly large (natural) breasts… as noted before, not a combination you’d ever be able to see in real life.
As for real-life women: I don’t like the extremes of skinniness or obesity. But i still surprise myself sometimes by how much body fat I’m willing to accpet on a woman; because more often than not it all depends on the woman. I’ve seen some that can carry a good 200 pounds and still keep a nice "hourglass" figure, while others look obese at 160. Generally, though, I like a firm look to a woman’s flesh, and the more muscle she carries, the better I like looking at her. (I’m happily married, so I don’t have any business doing anything but look!) I’m starting to back away from the ultra-shredded (or as El_Roy_1999 so amusingly but aptly put it, "super-dry") contest look I used to be fond of; but (once again, generally), the more muscle a woman carries, the more definition I like to see. I don’t like it when I see the same woman who, in a contest photo shows incredible definition and vascularity with nicely peaked biceps, comes in for an off-season photo shoot so overweight and smooth she can’t even raise a decent bulge when she flexes her arms.
(I gotta stop writing now… I got stuff to draw!!)
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