#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