This week’s illustration for the Animal Alphabets art challenge was a Gorilla. Many of the illustrations in this series have been going in the direction of being fairly realistic, so I tried to pull it back a bit and made the face to be a bit more cartoony.
An illustration of an Island Fox for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. This technically counts as the animal for the letter “F” instead of the “I” which is still down the alphabet a ways. In this illustration I was playing around with a few new brushes that I recently added to Clip Studio Paint, so this one was a bit of a learning experience.
This is an illustration of an Echidna for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. One of the toughest parts of drawing this animal was its hind claws. If you draw them correctly they look bizarre enough that someone could easily think you made a drawing mistake. To get past this problem I drew the claws as correctly as I could but ended up hiding them in shadow.
This is an illustration of a Dugong for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. The Dugong is a hard animal to draw because it can look so different depending on what angle you want to pick. I went through a few different angles before finding a photo of a porpoise that I used as the basis for this drawing. I had to modify a few features & shapes since porpoises have some significant differences from Dugongs, but hopefully I captured the essence of a Dugong with this illustration.
This is an illustration of a Cassowary for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. I have a version of this where the background is full color, but I decided to go with a flatter color so the bird stands out a little better.
An illustration of a Blue Whale for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. Originally started this one out with a diver shining a light on the whale, but I decided to take the diver out of the picture. I liked how the diver turned out, but it just seemed to add complexity to the illustration that was unnecessary. I might try to keep the focus of these illustrations on the animals in their natural environment if I can, but we’ll see how it goes.
This is an Asiatic Black Bear, who is in danger of extinction due to hunting and habitat loss. I drew this bear because I’ve joined up with the Animal Alphabets art challenge on twitter this week. The people who run the official Animal Alphabets twitter account give artists a specific animal to draw each week, and the artists post their 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.
This challenge has been around for about three rounds at this point, with various sub-themes for each round. The first was just animals in general, the second focused on fictional animals, and the third strayed from the “animal” concept a bit to incorporate fairy-tale characters. I was a bit nervous of what the theme would be for this round, but happily it’s endangered animals. I love making illustrations that have an educational component to them, so this is right up my alley.
