Can't Look This Horse in the Mouth

The headless horseman rides a headless horse. And holds on for dear life (dear death?) A stupid doodle, only 4 more days 'til Halloween!

Horse horns

Doodling unicorns again. Then came the elusive bicorn!

Some curved horns on this one. This is the heaviest horse I've ever drawn. I'm liking the beard.

An unfinished classic unicorn, and then, could it be a tricorn? Yow!

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.

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.

First Doodles of the Year

Happy 2009! Here are a few weird drawings since I haven't posted anything for a while. Balinese angel, saddest elephant seal, and a mad pied crow.

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).

Two Canines with No Skin

I decided to draw skulls in my new brown sketchbook. I thought it would be fun to do white highlights and darker shadows and keep it mostly the browny paper color. These are the skulls of a coyote and a red fox. I used my trusty purple pencil and a few colors of watercolor pencil. The paper got a little wrinkly from the washes but I do like the results overall.

Bushnewborn

Baby bushbaby with only slightly exaggerated head size.

Cheetahs Never Prosper

Even though my art isn't usually very stylized, I like good stylization and playing around with how far you can go with something and have it still be recognizable. I first drew this cheetah realistically from some zoo pictures. Then I made it a little simpler but still semi-realistic.

After that, I squinted at it and looked for the overall shape, which was pretty much 2 triangles. In the third drawing I made the spots bigger but put fewer of them on there. Finally, I went a bit overboard and simplified it a lot. The main things I concluded you need to still read as "cheetah" are spots, the eye/muzzle markings, and long body. For the last one, I thought I needed to add the tail on to make it work, and color it yellow. Looks like I could make an alphabet out of these guys.

Yet more griffins

And now it's time for more griffins. These are vulture/hyena mixes, which I'm sure has been done a million times before. The top one is a griffin vulture (wow, nature got the idea first!) with a spotted hyena. I don't think the furry ears go well on the bald vulture head. It's hard to fit the wings of these guys in without covering up the animal booties.



This one's a palm-nut vulture, with a brown hyena. But neither end looks like either of these animals. I do like the long hyena ears.

The last one is the best, I think. Bearded vultures are one of my favorite birds. I wonder where I can see some in person. This one has a striped hyena backside. I like the way the floofiness of the vulture mimics the fuzzy mane of the hyena. Bearded vultures are also called lammergeiers. It means lamb vulture, though they don't really eat lambs, they eat bones. Yay for bonecrushing bearded vultures!

Fabled art

This was meant to be a color study for a more realistic painting of the Aesop's fable about the fox and the crane, but I kind of like it this way. I wish I had made the crane more stylized too. The fox looks a bit like it's barfing in the second picture. The fable goes: the fox invited the crane over for dinner. It served some soup in a flat dish, and the crane couldn't eat any. The next day the crane invites the fox over, and serves soup in a long vase, so the fox can't get any. The lesson is, don't eat soup with anyone who has a different shaped mouth than you, I guess.





Here is a Japanese snow monkey with an offering of cookies, from a suggestion. I liked the little bear so I included it too.

Art Suggestion Box

I asked my friends for a few suggestions of new animals to draw. Here's a batch of them now. We have a blind mole, a genet, a fossa, and a paca. I've only ever drawn a fossa before; one was sleeping in a ball at the zoo, so I only got its nose anyway. This is the entire sketchbook page (those dots on the left is the perforation). I did my best trick of drawing one picture too close to another, so the genet's tail got in the way of the fossa's elbow.

Do you have an animal you'd like to see drawn? Leave a comment, and maybe your species will be here next time!

Piña Power!

I still have been sketching every day, I just haven't been on the computer in a while. I got out the good old purple pencil to do a picture of a bilby with a baby pineapple. I've almost filled up my watercolor sketchbook. I should get a new one for the new year.

All Hallow's Eve

Here are some not very exciting sketches. I went through the last month or so and picked out all the spookiest ones to haunt you for the rest of your days. There's a creepy demon lady, the Purple People Eater (he's a jogger), and a curly monster that I didn't finish. Boooo!

Tin Boxes A-Plenty!

Hi-dilly-ho, neglectarinos! I need to put more sketches on here. But I'm too lazy to scan and I don't like doing digital sketches. I even tried to color this sketch digitally but it looked horrid so nuts to that.

This probably needs some explanation (if you already get it, you're a genius!) In India, I guess most office workers like to eat homemade meals, out of tin cylinders. A wife or mom or someone makes the lunch, and a person called a dabbawalla collects a bunch of cylinders and delivers them. I saw a documentary on them once; it's a very complicated system but they almost never make mistakes and are very punctual. So in my world, a double-wattled cassowary got a job as a dabbawalla!

I got a vintage tin recipe box to put stuff in. I think I'll keep my gouache in it and be the coolest person ever.

Hilarity Ensues!

Here are some doodles that I thought were funny. When you laugh at your own drawings, you know they're good. Right? RIGHT?!?

The giant mole rat is just hilarious on its own, no explanation necessary. The man makes me laugh because he looks so happy and has tiny skinny legs. The dog was drawn with an old calligraphy pen. Dogs with cones on their heads do not like it when you make fun of them, but you can't help it.

As I think I've said before, about 90% of my sketching results in small (these are each about 2 or 3 inches across) rough scribbles. I hope someone gets a smile from this post.

Color Sketches (kind of)

Here are some things taken from my daily sketches. For this first one, I used a red pen. Anyone want to guess what breed of dog it is? I like the cat, it's not my usual style but it has a certain charm. She has a bell on her collar but it looks kind of like a skull, which makes it even cooler!

The little purple goat was a quick sketch, also not really in my usual drawing style. For some reason, I can't stop looking at it. Ah, what a narcissist I am! I think I just like its expression. Why do I like my scribbly things more than the "real" art?

The Beautiful People, Take 2

I like these caricatures better. Still not perfect but then I guess it's hard since I can't see their features from other angles. I can't get a handle on what their noses look like. Yay, we like Brooks Brothers.

I'm Voguing!

I found the proceeding ad in Vogue magazine and decided to use it as my caricature practice. I thought trying to exaggerate models' features would be challenging. I had never done any caricatures, to my recollection. Drawing people isn't really my bag, baby.

I came up with this drawing. I don't think it works too well as a caricature; usually they're cartoonier, and uglier/meaner, than this. I think the woman was easier. Thank goodness for her far-apart eyes! The man came out pretty generic. I tried to latch on to his uneven eyebrows and kind-of-weird ears. Ah well, not too bad for a first attempt. If anyone else tries this, lemme see!