100 Furry Milk-drinkers

Ah, a new art challenge for myself. I wanted to use gouache, and got out my black sketchbook. I painted this little elephant drinking strawberry milk first, and was inspired to try to paint 100 tiny pictures. Now, a few things I like are mammals, cute things, and food. So, what better to make than 100 tiny mammals with food! A came up with a few guidelines: each mammal will be different, each will be holding a food or drink item, each will have some kind of clothes or other body adornment, each will have tiny indigo dots for eyes, each will have a fruit or flower somewhere, and each will have pink cheeks. Phew, that's a lot!

I figured if I did five a day, I'd be done by the end of the month. I don't know if I'll keep up that pace, but the first five were completed. Each painting is about an inch high, so these are scanned at five times actual size or so. This makes all errors even more glaring. While the elephant is highly stylized, the next few are getting more detail.

The beaver is using cob knobs! All of these have my trademark microscopic white eye highlight.

This echidna is eating one of those twisty unicorn pops. You can't really see the little toe nail ring on one foot.

This is a pika, if you can't tell. She's holding a blueberry muffin (maybe just the muffin top).

The last painting I did is of an aardvark with a beret and a loaf of french bread. Bonjour!

From the depths of the jungle primeval...

I painted this jungle girl-type before. I liked her design, so I did a bit of doodling of the same character. She seems to live in an unidentified country in a wild landscape, is short with big messy hair and has a big booty good for walking everywhere. She also wears a bone bracelet on one arm, a flower in her hair sometimes, and prefers to make her outfits out of the pelts of various species of mammals, being careful to preserve the tails.


I don't have a name or any other back story about her, I just think it's fun to draw somone living off the land and having adventures with animals.

Ho ho!

I've had this idea for a while, and just got around to sketching it. I think this would make a fun button set -- animals with double names. I can't think of a good title; it seems that there are lots of words that have rhyming syllables but I can't think of any with repeated syllables.

There are a few more birds that fit this category (dodo being the most obvious) but I didn't want too many of them. I like motmots a lot. Did you know that they make their tail feathers look like? They pull bits off to make the little spatulas.

Dikdiks are quite a bit skinner than this one but I was trying for more cartoony. The cuscus is my favorite drawing of all. It would be fun to do these again, or some more. I just like to get the idea down before it's lost to the ages like so many of the artwork I see in my head but never record. These are tiny watercolor paintings with purple inking, by the way.

New Year, Old Art

The computer was out of commission for a while from right after my last post until now. I wanted to put up the last picture I did in 2009. It's a family a raptory dinosaurs of indeterminate species. Yeah, the father dinos probably didn't stick around raising the babies, but I wanted to draw him anyway. They're based on grebes. Ink sketch with messy watercoloring.

Christmas Cheer!

Happy Christmas one and all! Reindeer are cute with their giant heads and spread toes. Sometimes they have white faces and pinto spots. Experimenting with some weird stylization on the legs; a drying-out red pen and watercolor drawing in a sketchbook.

Going the way of the dodo

I painted this little picture sitting on my bed listening to mariachi music. The idea was from a receipt by my bed that I scribbled "angel dodo" on when I woke up in the middle of the night once. Double wings are weird, but I wanted to have it flying. I based the coloring in part on the bleeding heart dove. I was going to give it a halo of feathers like a crowned pigeon; then I decided that was going overboard with the Columbidae and religious imagery.

I got a new pen that's supposed to be gray ink (it's really a permanent Martha Stewart scrapbooking pen). I'm disappointed that it's not as light as I wanted. It looks like slightly faded black ink. Martha, how could you! I should've got the indigo or heliotrope one.

Fling! Monkey Doodles

Not many people seem to like monkeys. I do, I think they're fun to watch and have interesting expressions, shapes, and colors. Here's a page from my sketchbook, with bunches of scribbles relating to monkeys.

Patas monkeys look like English gentlemen to me. They have white mustaches and kind of parted hair.

Uakaris are a bit (OK, a lot) scary since they're bald. They do have neat fat fluffy tails though. Squirrel monkeys are cute, right? They're so little.

Spider monkeys have fun hairdos and really skinny legs with big tails. Capuchins can have nice styles too; sometimes they have 2 bumps on their head. The little one at the bottom left is a common marmoset, which are very cute and have giant white ear tufts.