Since it’s close to the holidays, the Animal Alphabets challenge asked people to draw some animals with Christmas jumpers. I didn’t plan on taking part of this, but I couldn’t get the image of this Crab out of my mind. I’m glad I decided to draw this though–it was a nice way to cut loose and have a bit of fun after doing a full A-Z Animal Alphabet cycle.
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. Continue reading
This week’s illustration for the Animal Alphabets art challenge was a Zalmoxes. I started out with the intention to make this a smooth skinned dinosaur, but after testing out some feathers I quickly got carried away with feather arrangements. Since I haven’t drawn many feathers during this round, it’s probably a good thing that I gave it a try for this last animal of the alphabet. Next week I’ll post the completed set of illustrations to the blog with some thoughts about the challenge.
An illustration of a Yukon Giant Camel for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. I’ve noticed that using only flat colors for creatures with fur can look a little stale, so I’ve started mixing in some painterly shading as well. I probably went a little too far with the shading here, but I’m happy to be making some progress on various ways to draw fur.
Here is an illustration of a Xinjiangtitan for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. The texture that I achieved on the Velociraptor reminded me a bit of DAUB’s FluidInk brushes, so I decided to try them out on this illustration. I was a big fan of those brushes when they first came out, but I’ve never actually used them on a project before now. The set-up for the brushes is a bit annoying, but the results that you can get with them are amazing. I really need to play with these brushes more in the future.
This week’s illustration for the Animal Alphabets art challenge was a Woolly Rhinoceros. Someone contacted me earlier this year and mentioned that I the Rhino that I drew last year had only one horn instead of two. I corrected that mistake on my blog, but I think it’s interesting that I get to draw an actual two horned Rhino this year as well. Hopefully I didn’t mess up any details on this one!
An illustration of a Velociraptor for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. To achieve some of the color gradations in this I used the posterization filter in Clip Studio Paint. I had played around with the filter before, but I never actually used it on a final drawing before this one.
Here is an illustration of a Udanoceratops for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. Since only a skull of this animal has been found, I thought I’d take some liberties with the body and put some plates on it’s back. This is probably a wrong interpretation scientifically, but I thought it looked interesting so I went with it.
This week’s illustration for the Animal Alphabets art challenge was a Tyrannosaurus Rex. This animal looked better with orange skin in my opinion, but I decided to go with blue because I had just drawn an orange tiger last week.
An illustration of a Sabre-Toothed Tiger for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. I’ve drawn a couple black and white tigers during the past inktober challenges I’ve done, but I’ve never tried to draw a basic full bodied tiger in color before. The stripes were the toughest part to work on–it reminded me of the difficulty I had with drawing Zebra stripes last year.
