Animal Week 2011 # 4: Chimpanzee

I used a random number generator to figure out which page and image to use and here he is, one of humanity's closest relatives! All I can think of is a radio piece I once heard about Alpha Males in primates. The conventional wisdom is the alpha, being the toughest, passes his genes onto the females. However, many times, he's too busy defending his territory and the lesser males... er... get the jump on him, so to speak.

There you go. The hardest part of this was trying to work cross-hatch shadows on the bare skin into the hair without the shadows looking like hair. Not sure if it was a total success.



Now, I'm off to finish another drawing I'm working on. The pencils look good, let's see if I can't screw up the inks.

See you... in the Future!!!

Listening to while posting: "Love Song" by Ofra Haza (on Soma FM's Secret Agent station)

Animal Week 2011 # 3: Seals

Arjan chose #5 in his comments. The fifth animal in the book is the seal and DANG that was hard. I won't claim complete failure, but it was nowhere near a success. Today's animal has two because I didn't like the first one and tried another.

It was a lot of time invested int these two little drawings. The initial drawing of the basic shapes went well and I was happy. I'll tell you, though, rendering a mottled, gradiated, subtly shaded and wet furred animal in murky water is difficult (for me at least). The white whiskers were also a pain. That's what I get for letting a Netherlander choose an animal for me ;)



Listening to while posting: "Never Gonna Happen" by Lily Allen

Animal Week 2011 # 2: The Zebra

So, today's drawing is brought to you by Sweet Enemy. She picked it and I'm not sure why. Perhaps because it was really hard. After completing this, I now know why there aren't a great deal of zebra, or zebra-based creatures in comic books. MAN, I'd hate to have to replicate a stripe pattern in panel after panel. So, if you are missing the zebra or zebra-based characters in my work, now you know why. The cool thing about the book I'm using is that when they put eighteen zebras next to each other, you can really see how individual and exquisite the stripe patterns are.

I'm re-learning how to place something in the page when drawing form life or a photo. Our old drawing teacher at MECA, Al Gardener, would joke about students starting on the left and then having to cram the rest of the figure into the right hand side of the page.

With very little more ado, here is a zebra:



Listening to while posting: "La Cosa Mas Chunga" by Modaji on Secret Agent Radio on Soma FM

Animal Week 2011 # 1: The Hippopotamus

I'm the kind of person that needs goals, tangible goals to learn. So, in an effort to improve my drawing skills, particularly in inking and shading, every day this week, I'm doing an animal from Akira Satoh and Kyoko Toda's fantastic book Animal Faces. It's out of print but, a great resource for drawing.

Each drawing will be approximately 3.5" x 3.5", drawn in red pencil and inked with a Pigma Micron. I'll post the image immediately after I finish it take any criticisms you'll dish out and any suggestions you might have; my only stipulation is that you point out one thing that does work.

There are twenty-four animals in the book (with eighteen different portraits) so, if anyone wants to throw out a number between 1 and 24 that isn't 13, that will be the animal for tomorrow.

Here's today's, the Hippopotamus:



listening to while posting: "Tokyo, I'm on My Way" by Puffy AmiYumi (I can't get enough of this song for some reason. It drives Sweet Enemy nuts and I think I'll go upstairs and sing the refrain to her right now!)