The Living Desert

I visited the Living Desert last weekend. There were many cool animals that were mostly out and about. Sadly, my camera ran out of battery charge right at the beginning. I was able to do a few quick sketches; here are two.

First some black-crowned night herons. There was an unusual walk-in aviary that had vultures, herons, a roadrunner, grackles and a raven. The herons stayed on the ground and didn't move too much. These guys have cool red eyes.

I also drew an addax. They're a highly endangered antelope. And they have cute spiral horns and an x-shaped brown patch on their faces. I was dumb and started painting it close to the edge of the paper so I couldn't give it hindquarters.

Undead Ungulate

A doodle with a Halloweeny touch; the musk deer vampire. They do have teeth like this, I promise. Don't even think about making perfume from his gland!

This took about 5 minutes so please excuse the lazy cape and weird expression.

Lean Winter = Plump Tail

Ah, autumn. The leaves are changing, the pumpkins are growing, the falanoucs' tails are storing fat...

A weird sketch of a falanouc - a relative of the fossa from Madagascar. It doesn't look too much like one, but I was intrigued by the super-big tail on an illustration and wanted to draw it too. This is done on a 3.5 x 5 inch piece of a new kind of paper I was testing out (Rising Stonehenge Vellum finish 120 lb; nice and smooth but with a slight bit of buckling).