This week’s illustration for the Animal Alphabets art challenge was a Quetzalcoatlus. As someone who likes to try out many different poses at the sketch stage I find pterosaurs frustrating to draw because there seems to be a limited set of good looking poses for these creatures.
An illustration of a Paraphysornis for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. I started with this bird being blue but after playing around with the colors a bit it just looked better in red. To experiment with colors I used a layer correction technique called “Gradient Map” that I’d never used before–I’ll definitely have to play with it more in the future.
Here is an illustration of a Orohippus for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. After I got done with this I realized that the hair and spots on this look a lot like how I approached the Snow Leopard that I drew last year.
This week’s illustration for the Animal Alphabets art challenge was a Nigersaurus. I spent most of my time on this one trying out various compositions. Fitting this long animal into a square frame turned out to be more challenging than I expected.
An illustration of a Mammoth for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. I had a lot of trouble figuring out how I wanted to draw the hair on this animal. Hair is something I definitely need more practice with so hopefully there will be some more hairy animals to draw in this series.
Here is an illustration of a Lambeosaurus for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. Early on I went for an orange color for this dino, but I noticed that I’ve already drawn three in this series using that color. Using a correction layer I changed the hue to something a bit more purple since I hadn’t used that color yet. I haven’t used the blue part of the color wheel much in this series so far so I really need to make an effort to go there more often in future illustrations if possible.
This week’s illustration for the Animal Alphabets art challenge was an Kryptops. I haven’t given much emotion to the animals I’ve been drawing so far so I thought I’d throw in a bit of stomping & screaming in this one.
An illustration of a Jaekelopterus for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. I didn’t have a lot of time to work on this one, but oddly I feel that I couldn’t have improved this much if I had any more time. (A rare feeling!) I started out using silhouette sketches for this drawing and I think that helped me complete this faster than usual.
Here is an illustration of a Ianthasaurus for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. I noticed that a lot of the reference for this animal was from a side view, so I tried to do something closer to a 3/4 view just to make it a bit more dynamic. Spent a lot of time on this drawing exploring various skin textures–so many of them to try out!
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.
