endangered

Animal Alpabets – Endangered Animals

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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 →

Yellow-eyed Penguin

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An illustration of a Yellow-eyed Penguin for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. Since the penguin has both a dark and light color to its body, it was hard to figure out what kind of background should go behind it. I eventually went with a lighter background since the penguin is covered more by a darker color in general, and it also gave a chance to work in some highlights into the water.

Whooping Crane

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This week’s illustration for the Animal Alphabets art challenge was a Whooping Crane. I started this drawing with a similar approach to the crane I drew last year, drawing the bird with simple shapes and a minimal background. I really liked that early version to be honest, but since I’ve been doing realistic backgrounds for this series I thought it best to keep within that style and draw what you see here.

Vaquita

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An illustration of a Vaquita for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. One of the most challenging aspects of drawing this animal is that there are very few reference photos available, probably due to the low number of animals out in the wild. Most of the animals we’ve been doing so far have had an abundance of photos, so I really enjoyed the challenge of researching and trying to get the details right with this one.

Ulysses Butterfly

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Here is an illustration of a Ulysses Butterfly for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. For some reason I had a hard time deciding on a good place to put my copyright notice in this one. I tried all kinds of places but ended up putting it just above the branch–kind of an obvious place I suppose. It’s always a bit of a battle between making it somewhat noticeable and somewhat hidden.