This is a complete line-up of illustrations I created this year for the Animal Alphabets art challenge featuring extinct 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 extinct animals.

Here’s a few thoughts about this project:

• After the last round of Animal Alphabets I swore off of drawing backgrounds, but I think I may have went too far. The lack of any backgrounds sometimes made the compositions poorer and the animals themselves a little less relatable. I’m considering adding a few dashes of plant-life if I ever do one of these again.
• At times I struggled with extinct animals not having exact likenesses to reference. If I was drawing mythical animals I would have felt more free to cut loose, but since they were historical animals I felt a bit constrained to stick to what scant details existed about them. It was an unusual mix of fact and fiction that I wasn’t quite used to dealing with in my work.
• The best thing from this round is I finally got a handle on tracking the time I spent on illustrations. Previous drawings would expand to all the free time I had, but by recording the time of my illustrations I was able to be more efficient with my artistic process and get things done way faster than I had previously.

I had a great time drawing these animals and learning about their histories. While I was enthusiastic during most of this round, it did start dragging a bit for me towards the end. Perhaps it’s time to start some other illustration challenges.