#35 The Beaver

Animalia: Day 20

The Beaver

I was originally going to add lots of shadow, shading, and texture to this,

but I didn't much feel like it, so there you have it.

Tomorrow: the Bison

#34 The Bear (Sunbear)

Animalia: Day 19

The Bear

So I drew the Sun bear,

which I didn't know about until my girlfriend alerted me yesterday.

So, if you looked at the linky above,

you already know that the sun bear is the cobra of the ursids.

They have fatty beefcake necks with sweet designs on em,

which according to wikipedia,

serves some sort of practical purpose (yeah right internet).

Anyways, apart from being cobras and fatnecks and the inspiration for pokemon,

sun bears are also straight gangster,

and frequently gather in groups of three in order to freestyle and look dope.

I drew this about a year ago when I came across this picture.

I liked the long neck bear idea, so I carried it over.

Here's the final, which I am pretty happy with:

Tomorrow: the Beaver

#33 The Bat (Wrinkle-Faced Bat)

Animalia: Day 18

The Bat

Today's drawing is kind of weak.

I really like bats, and I put them in a lot of drawings,

but they are pretty hard to draw actually.

I picked the Centurio Senex, or wrinkle-faced bat,

which have the most intense face wrinkles ever.

After finding this picture,

I kind of realized nothing I drew would be as cool as this.

I couldn't find many full body shots,

so I ended up just putting him in a big cartoon hand.

Pretty let down with today's drawing.

Tomorrow: the Bear

#32 The Basking Shark

Animalia: Day 17

The Basking Shark

These is real hard to draw, so I went with the "straight forward with big head" approach.

Did the top thumbnail first, then drew it big.

Wanted to do something a little less straight forward,

so I made this other thumbnail which nick described as looking like sliced sushi.

Then I drew that big, didn't work out as well.

Remembered I wanted to add cleaner fish after scanning, so added + rescanned.

Check out Nick's. One of his best.

Tomorrow: the Bat

#31 The Basilisk

Animalia: Day 16

The Basilisk

Really running out of sketchbook room.

BeeTeeDubs, the colors in the sketchbook were there when I got it.

Tried out few photoshop brushes I downloaded.

Tomorrow: the Basking Shark

#30 The Barreleye

Animalia: Day 15

The Barreleye

The Barreleye is an awesome fish.

It's eyes don't come into contact with the outside world.

Instead, they reside inside its head, encased in a translucent bubble.

Basically, I want to know why all animals aren't designed with a windshield.

I think I will probably be doing more pencil drawings.

In retrospect, I should have made the lines around the head and tail much thinner,

which would have made the translucence much more convincing.

Oh well, hindsight is 20/20...

which sucks for people who have 20/16 vision.

Tomorrow: the Basilisk (lizard).

#29 The Badger

Animalia: Day 14

The Badger

This one is a little weak,

but these have been taking up wayyy too much of my time as of late,

and I have been losing sleep over it,

while trying to recover from sickness, so, whatever.

Also, I feel like this is more the sort of sketch I had in mind

when I thought of the animalia project.

The other more involved, full page pictures are nice,

and I'm glad they have happened,

but I really didn't expect them to be much more than this one.

Tomorrow: the Barreleye fish!

#28 The Baboon

Animalia: Day 13

The Baboon

Originally was going to do kabuki actor ukiyo e print style baboon.

Then moved towards a japanese scroll illustration,

which I mainly used for the face,

then when I started putting down the pen,

it just became a pretty boring drawing.

Added color, didn't change it much.

Tomorrow: the Badger

#27 The Axolotl

Animalia: Day 12

The Axolotl

No picture touch ups or editing on this one.

The axolotl is basically a Mudkips.

They come in a variety of colors and such,

but generally, they're awesome looking.

The trouble with drawing awesome looking animals

is that the picture will never be as awesome as the animal.

Tomorrow: the Baboon.

#26 The Aye-aye

Animalia: Day 11

The Aye-aye

I'm running out of room in this sketchbook.

The aye aye is a creepy monkey thing.

Didn't plan on adding color at first,

but the eyes were missing something, so I added yellow.

Then had to do the rest from there.

This, and tomorrow's animals were at the suggestion of my sister.

Tomorrow: the Mudk... err, Axolotl.

#25 The Armadillo

Animalia: Day 10

The Armadillo

As always, sketchbook drawing first.

I did a lot of sketches for poses, going off the idea of armadillo as giant monster

(I have been reading The Goon, and wanted to

do a mid punch pose, which didn't happen in the end).

It wasn't working at all until I faced his head upwards, bearing the teeth.

I first inked the outline, then did ballpoint for shading, and then sharpie for texture.

It kind of turned into a mess, which I tried to cover up in photoshop with pretty colors.

After I had finished it in photoshop,

I realized I had subconsciously worked off of this model.

Tomorrow: the Aye aye. (At my sister's suggestion)

#24 The Argali

Animalia: Day 9

The Argali

Nick inspired me to try ink. & backgrounds.

I had mixed feelings about this, but I'm feeling better about it now.

I added a bit of color in photoshop.

The argali is a mountain-y sheep thing. It's another horned quadruped.

If you want a picture, google search.

But it's kind of depressing because over half of the image results

are people posing with argali corpses and guns.

Tomorrow: the Armadillo

#23 The Archaeopteryx

Animalia: Day 8

The Archaeopteryx

Now initially, the list I found didn't include any dinosaurs.

But since it did include every kind of horned quadruped imaginable,

and separate listings for horse, pony, mare, and mustang,

we will be doing some improvising.

Nick takes credit for the suggestion of archaeopteryx,

a favorite of mine.

To make up for yesterday's gibbon kind of sucking,

I spent a lot of time on this.

Also, while looking up pictures of them,

I found this rendition of the archaeopteryx,

which I like because it shows that the archaeopteryx is just

a mix between a noctowl and a sentret.

Tomorrow: the Argali

#22 The Ape

Animalia: Day 7

The Ape

Haven't been too successful at rendering my own renditions of the past two animals.

Hopefully that will come more as time goes on?

I drew this gibbon monkey because the list we have has chimp,

gorilla, and orangutan listed separately from ape...

Tomorrow: the Archaeopteryx

#21 The Antelope

Animalia: Day 6

The Antelope

Another horned quadruped.

Gave up on trying to make a real drawing and just went with this.

Tomorrow: the Ape

#20 The Anteater

Animalia: Day 5

The Anteater

I decided to go with the Giant Anteater rather than the Pangolin, or scaly anteater.

This was partly because I thought Nick might be doing the Pangolin,

and also because I wasn't interested in taking the time to draw all them scales.

With that in mind, I present the Giant Anteater:

I remembered after I inked the outline that I wanted to add a baby on the back,

so I drew some options and added one for the final in Photoshop.

Very happy with how this one and the alligator turned out.

Also, did you know an anteater walks on its knuckles like a gorilla,

in order to preserve the sharpness of its nails.

It can use them to take down a cougar or a jaguar.

Also, this comes up when googling Giant Pangolin(NSFW?)

Tomorrow: the Antelope

#19 The Alpaca

Animalia: Day 4

The Alpaca

As I said with the addax, I am the worst at 4 leggers.

the alpaca face gave me a lot of trouble,

they kept coming out as long necked dobermans.

I didn't separate them after clean up because I didn't like any of them that much.

My least favorite is the head, I am bad at shading in solids.

Tomorrow: the Anteater

#18 The Alligator

Animalia: Day 3

The Alligator

So this is from last night, and I will try and post today's later today.

I just posted the sketchbook page because they were pretty clean drawings

and laid out on the page fine

Going to be honest,

Didn't really know the difference between an alligator and crocodile until this.

I knew it had something to do with one having a narrower head,

and the other having a rounder one, but I didn't know which was which.

Originally I had this idea of really accentuating the difference

by making the alligator have a giant round shovel head,

which is kind of what happened in the second drawing,

but it's less rounded and shovelly than I had initially imagined.

Later today: the Alpaca

#17 Molded Heroes

The Molded Heroes show happened last weekend in Aurora, IL.

Nick and I both had prints in the show (Nick's is hyper-violent TMNT),

and they are both up for purchase on the Molded Heroes website.

Here is the print I did:

Nick actually printed this for me and everything,

so a big thanks (and a bottle of night train?) is owed there.

It is basically a knockoff of this etching by Rembrandt.

The print is a little bit of a one-liner, essentially equating all life decisions as fruitless -

by way of juxtaposition of Rembrandt's original message and references to starter Pokemon.

The original print deals with the myth of Faust

and his decision between worldly and religious pursuits -

a pretty common theme in art of the Dutch Golden Age.

Its presence is seen in vanitas, still-life, and genre painting.

Elements of these can be found in the original print and the "copy"

(take, for example, the skull in the background and book in the foreground).

Two posts in one day, gettin' busy.

#16 The Addax

Animalia: Day 2

The Addax

So, what's an addax?

^This apparently.^

I have always had trouble drawing four-legged animals,

moreso with animals with longer legs.

So I ended up drawing a few of these.

Here's the sketchbook page, and then individual cleaned up drawings:

I originally drew a little body for the head,

but it was awful so I covered it in sharpie.

I think the bean in the bottom right is my fav.

Tried to scale-up and refine it, but it didn't work as well:

Tomorrow: the Alligator

#15 The Aardvark

So, today I started a project I have been thinking about for a while.

I asked Nick to join me on it.

Partly to widen the scope of it, and partly to motivate each other.

I found a list of something like 183 animals in alphabetical order;

we are going to draw one everyday, starting with the aardvark.

The number wasn't significant, just a good number;

not too many; not too few.

Anyways, we will each draw that animal and then post them to our blogs.

Posts won't necessarily be everyday, so some batch posts may happen.

The reason for the project is to keep myself drawing something - anything -

and to study how animals are put together, how they move, how they are textured, and how they can be represented differently.

Animalia: Day 1

The Aardvark

Aardvarks are kind of terrifying, and kind of adorable.

This one looks like a terrifying human hybrid.

So, here's my drawing.

It's probably more involved than a lot of them will be.

I also did a some sketch above and to the right,

which shows that aardvarks are just Charmanders with long pig faces.

and here are the cleaned up ones:

Tomorrow: the Addax