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!

Why did they name a deadly sin after them?

I couldn't get this one to post with the others last time. This is my favorite sketch on this page. Three-toed sloth on the left, two-toed sloth on the right. Sloths have such funny faces, and the 2 kinds look so different from each other.

Mi-Teintes Thingies

I have a bunch of left-over Canson Mi-Teintes paper that I never use. This one's called buff, I think. I did a page of animal doodles, here are some of them.



On the left we have some colugo heads. These guys have a very unique look that I didn't really capture.





I like weird bat faces. There's so much variety in them, and lots of strange folds and flaps. This is banana bat, as you can see by the word balloon. I only had a picture of its head so the body is probably inaccurate.






This is a plains viscacha, a rodent kind of like a chinchilla.

Ivory-billed

I really enjoy painting griffins. I don't know why, probably because it's like painting a bird, but then it's all, whoa mammal time! I have lots of little doodles of crazy griffins. I like unconventional griffins, made of weird birds and not always cats. Such as this one, gouached in my little black book. Har har, ivory-billed woodpecker indeed!

I also really like drawing with non-photo blue Prismacolors on this black paper. I tried to leave a bit of the sketch showing but got rid of the rest of the background because the texture was a bit distracting (and it had some waviness due to me using too much water).

Wombat Divine

I'll admit, I like looking through the picture books. I've seen some great illustrations, great stories, boring stories, and hideous illustrations. There are so many picture books out there; it must be a very competitive field.

I found this one called Wombat Divine by Mem Fox, illustrated by Kerry Argent. It's about a wombat who wants to be in a Christmas pageant. It has a bunch of different Australian animals, from kangaroos and emus to the more unusual numbat. And guess who else is in there. Yes, a bilby who gets to be the Christmas angel.

It's a rather strange book, and it makes me wonder who would read/buy it. Some people might be attracted to the religious aspect, but then possibly be offended (the wombat gets to be Jesus in the play). The pictures are taken with a camera, not scanned, so you can see my shadow on them.

More like bintu-right!

Finally got around to painting a binturong after it was suggested to me last month. This one is playing with a paddleball. I've discovered that dioxazine violet and indigo make good black. I went a bit crazy with the color mixing though. Still experimenting with stylization and different degrees of detail.

I thought I'd throw in this lesser gymnure. He's related to hedgehogs, and is going for the gold. The actual painting is about 1 inch high, so please excuse the horrid letting!

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!

Boba Bilby

Someone help me, I need new animals to draw! A quick bilby, again. I like the big straws they give you to drink boba with. This is meant to show their weird toes (two claws on one toe, whaaa?!?)

Gouachings

I saw an appealing little picture that looked like it was done in gouache. I wanted to try out something similar, so I asked for some animals and used the first two suggestions. The first one, a mastodon, didn't come out too well. I wanted it to be stylized, with mostly thick brush-inked lines, and a circle of color around it. It came out too muddy and I think I went too thick on the inking. I kind of like the mastodon's stylization; it's a lot more angular than my stuff usually is. Painted with Havannah Lake (the supposed best gouache color ever).

The next animal was a tree kangaroo. I picked the Ursine Tree Kangaroo because I liked its floofy ears. I have no idea how I ended up with this picture though. I wanted it to be holding something and a spatula appeared, then the apron and egg wanted to get in to the picture. I like the border of this one better, with its fuzzy outline. I had also wanted to paint a furry animal without much furry texture to it. It kind of worked. It was an interesting experiment overall, don't know if I'll use this style again or not.

Jellybean Joey

Baby bilbies, the horrifying truth! A quick digital doodle. It looks like a shiny balloon.

I've been drawing a plethora of bilbies lately.

Paint it black

Wow, it's weird to write "08"! The first paintings of the new year. I got a black sketchbook. Boy, I'm out of practice with gouache. Oh well, now I can make many a painting in this book. Here we have Kitsumi playing Guitar Hero, and the littlest fat dragon ever riding on a non-scientifically accurate flying gurnard. Didn't feel like trying to draw with white pencil or anything, so straight to paint it was!

Thanks for the presents!

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.

Bilby Time!

Time for bilbies!

Paper malfunction?

My daily sketches have been very boring and scribbly lately. The next time I do something great, I'll update!

This is a weird bear and a camel with a piece of straw in its mouth.

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!

Calligraphics

I like drawing with this calligraphy pen! It has nice line variation but a bit more control than a brush pen since the tip isn't as flexible. It's pretty blue too.

I'm posting these picture not necessarily because I like them, but they have certain features that I liked. I was going for a 1930s cartoon character with this fellow. I like how his head came out, but his body is ugly. Real people should wear gloves and shorts and giant shoes with no shirt.

I'm pleased with the head feathers on this laughing cockatoo griffiny thing. I can never seem to plan nice flowy lines; they just appear sometimes by themselves. Its little wings are funny too.

The lion came out with some good line variations. I don't know what kind of critter he's getting scolded by. I hope that I can keep trying to get some of the crazy liveliness into my more finished artwork.

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.

Here Fishy Fishy Fishy!

I went fishing. It was cold but I found a way to keep warm and look extremely fashionable at the same time. I caught a fish of unknown species. Notice how my nail polish matches it!

Weirdo Fruits

This is a bad sketch of a weird idea that popped into my head. Actually, the dragon fruit bathing suit looks kinda cool.

Sophisticates

Whoops, haven't updated in a bit. All I have are sketches, so here are a proper bulldog, sailor seal, and hillbilly 'possum.

Cuddly Canine

I seem to draw a lot of chihuahuas. I guess because they're easy to make look funny. I ran out of room on the page, so there's no top or bottom to this drawing. But I thought it was funny. Poor doggy.

Actually, that's a pretty big chihuahua. Not-so-fun-fact: I hate drawing shoes.

Pink n Blue

Here are some doodles I did with a pink pen and the blue calligraphy pen. A chihuahua with an electric guitar, my cat noticing something slightly to the right, a dog listening to the radio, and some kind of horse monster. I thought his expression was funny. Horse-demon is not amused!

Fun with Taxidermy

Had a nice visit to the La Sierra University World Museum of Natural History. It has all kinds of taxidermied animals; reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals. Many are very well done, not the weird shrivelly creatures you sometimes see (a lot were prepared by freeze-drying). But since the collection was still being worked on, a lot of animals didn't have labels.

We had some time alone inside to sketch. The guy manning the office came over to see what was going on after I made a bunch of noise ripping paper out of my sketchbook and rattling around my watercolor set. Later, a big bunch of people came in on some kind of campus tour. Since I was sitting on the floor, leaning on another display case, I was either in their way or they'd try to be sneaky about looking at what I was doing. On to the sketches!

The museum said it has the largest collection of Southeast Asian birds in the US. There were many colorful birds of unknown species. The ones I painted had labels: two hornbills (a man said about the Helmeted Hornbill "That's the ugliest thing I've ever seen") and a cuckoo. The coolest birds were up too high to see while sitting and I it's hard to stand and hold all my watercolor stuff. I was kind of lazy with my color mixing on these. It's fun to draw birds that are holding still!

There were strange groupings of mammals; armadillos, monkeys, civets, baby hoofed animals. The bushdog looked a little off, but I liked its curled tail and shocked expression. I think the little armadillo was a six-banded. The capybara looked kind of mad too.

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.

Dollaridoo

One of my newest booky-wooks is a field guide to Australian birds. How I'd love to to use it in the field, looking at birds, in Australia!

The picture of the Dollar Bird was very cute, so I drew one spending its dollars on street snacks. Note the well-researched, lifelike vendor on the right (I couldn't picture what those cart thingies look like).

They're called dollar birds because of the little white circles on their wings.

Photo Unavailable

I decided I wanted to have a little picture in my Blogspot profile. Since I hate every photograph of me, a drawing it was!

I used my crow quill pen, my Dr. Martin's Bombay Black ink, my Winsor & Newton Artists' watercolours, and my W&N Series 7 brush (number 3). Yup, only the most expensive and high-quality supplies for my drawing of a super-deformed me drawing a bilby.

I <3 the 80's

Quick drawing of a totally radical 80's rocker chick.

I don't think I made her hair big enough.

Name That Tune

Sometimes I watch music videos online. I think up an old video or a song I like, and try to find it. So many memories. Here's a doodle from one of my favorite songs/videos. Can you guess what it's from? Pretty easy, I know. I liked his pose a lot (sorry for the anatomical mushiness, it was a tiny little low quality video after all!). Stupid hard-to-draw human proportions!

World's Largest Rodent

Capybaras like to go swimming. I made a little pen sketch, and decided to paint it. Watercolors for the water pig!

Triskaidekaphobia

Happy Friday the 13th!

Hooray for the Red, White, & Blue (and Green)

Let's celebrate the independence of our nation with a green bipedal uni-goat!

I hadn't inked or colored anything lately, so I got out my Copic Drawing pen and ended up with a goat with one horn. It was going to be a normal color, but I thought, why not make it green?

Oodle-doodle!

All I've been doing lately are crazy little sketches. I need a muse or something. First up are a few pencil drawings. I guess the sulking animal is a bunny. With the fox, I was trying for a different style (for me, at least). I don't know what that is riding the boar, but it's having fun.

I had fun with this picture in red pen. It's Alice and the March Hare; he's in a very weird position (so is she, now that I think about it), but I like the sketchy qualities of it.