This is a complete line-up of illustrations I created this year for the Animal Alphabets art challenge featuring endangered animals. Scroll through my blog to see larger images from the series.

Every week the Animal Alphabets twitter account announces an animal prompt, instructing artists to post their illustration of the animal on the following Monday. The animal’s name corresponds to each letter of the alphabet, so that’s why there are 26 animals in the challenge. The theme for this round was endangered animals. 

My goal in doing this challenge was to not only draw various animals but also to try out different styles and brushes in my digital process. As a group the illustrations don’t fit together well, but since I had a more exploratory goal in mind I think that’s ok.

Here’s a few things I learned artistically from this project:

• I prefer working with flat colors. You might notice that I started off the alphabet using flat colors, but fairly quickly I slipped into a more painterly or realist mode of working. About mid-way through I started to regret this decision and tried to figure out how to get more abstraction into the work. Drawing the Red Panda I immediately felt better about my approach to the project. Realism is fun and all, but it just isn’t my preferred style.
• Natural backgrounds are time consuming to draw. I hadn’t done extensive work on natural backgrounds before, and I think it shows in the work. For the majority of the illustrations I ended up spending twice the time on the background as the animal. I’m glad I got a chance to practice natural backgrounds, but I think if I do another challenge like this I need to put a flat color in the background for the sake of time.
• It might be ok to skip a week once in a while. Parts of this series were harder to pull off than others due to outside commitments. I’m the type of person who likes to work ahead on projects, but that’s not how challenges like this work. I pride myself in my reliability as an artist, but I think I’ll probably have to skip some weeks in the future in order to be productive with other projects and give myself a break once in a while.

It must be said that I absolutely loved illustrating the subjects of this series. It was so amazing to learn about these endangered animals and see their fragile habitats. It’s going to be hard to have an animal alphabets series that’s going to top this on my list.