This week’s illustration for the Animal Alphabets art challenge was an Hesperornis. I started out my sketches for this drawing using silhouettes. I don’t think I had tried this technique since college, but was curious to try this approach again after re-discovering it while trying out some digital brushes recently. While silhouettes might not work well as starting points for some drawings, I found that it work pretty well for this bird at least.
An illustration of a Glyptodon for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. I started this one by picking out a new digital brush I hadn’t used before (Frenden’s Mungman) and it seemed to alter the direction I took to a more abstract style than usual. I enjoyed playing with the brush, so I will likely be using it again.
Here is an illustration of a Feilongus for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. I think this illustration might lean more cartoony as a reaction to how realistic I got with last week’s Einiosaurus. It’s been a bit of a struggle to figure out how cartoony or realistic to make these creatures.
This week’s illustration for the Animal Alphabets art challenge was an Einiosaurus. Sometimes when I’m drawing I’ll do a quick experiment to change the shading layer to a different color just to see what it looks like. Most of the time it looks terrible, but this drawing was the rare exception where it looked kind of interesting so I ended up re-engineering the lighting for the whole drawing.
An illustration of a Dakosaurus for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. My original sketches for this were a bit more fantastical, but it bothered me that the sketches didn’t fit the fossil record. I eventually pulled back the shapes to a compromise between the two, but I do miss the whimsical nature of those original sketches.
Here is an illustration of a Ceratogaulus (Horned Gopher) for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. Would have liked to try a pose where the animal was looking straight at the camera, but a side view really works best to show off those horns.
This week’s illustration for the Animal Alphabets art challenge was a Boreaspis. Some of the reference drawings for this creature show small eyes, but I deliberately made them comically large instead. I’m hoping to draw the animals in this round of animal alphabets in a more humorous vein than my last set, so I’m betting that exaggerated eyes are going to become a regular part of these illustrations.
This is an Alvarezsaurus, a dinosaur that lived approximately 86 – 83 million years ago. I illustrated this animal because I’ve decided to take up the Animal Alphabets art challenge again. A refresher of how this art challenge works: The people who run the official Animal Alphabets twitter account name a specific animal to draw each week, and the artists post their completed work on Mondays at 19:30 GMT. The animals name corresponds to each letter of the alphabet, so at the end of the exercise I should have 26 animals to show.
The sub-theme for this round of Animal Alphabets is extinct animals. One of the challenges of the endangered animals series was gathering enough photo reference material to get the details correct. I’m betting there will be little to no photo references for these animals, and I can’t quite decide if that’s going to be a good thing or a bad thing yet. In the case of the Alvarezsaurus it was quite a freeing feeling to not have photo reference I must say.
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. Continue reading
This week’s illustration for the Animal Alphabets art challenge was a Zebra. Drawing creatures from the horse family is always hard to do, but adding stripes made this an extra challenge. So happy to be done with this project! I’ll post the complete alphabet next week with my thoughts about the challenge as a whole.
