I hope you will enjoy his show

I've had an urge to draw the Beatles, but not being a good portraitist, I of course wanted to make an animal instead. The Sgt. Pepper's outfits are so cool, so I did a watercolor sketch of a fox in George Harrison's ensemble. He's a poorly-drawn Bengal fox. Get it, a fox from India, George Harrison, huh huh? What an awesome hat he had, and black spats. He's playing a flute because George is holding a flute on the cover; it's true, look it up!

Also, flutes are hard to draw and I'm too lazy to look up what they look like.

Bunnicorn

I wanted to make a little painting and ended up with a uni-cloud, uni-flower, and uni-bunny eating a cheeseburger. I don't know either. They kind of look more like they're wearing party hats, but they are horns.

Flu-dles

Nothing fabulous to post, so I decided to put up some drawings I did when I was sick. I was in bed all day, alternately sleeping, feeling horrible, and being bored. My fever-ravaged mind thought that CatFox was the best idea ever, so I doodled it in ballpoint pen. Note the stylish ear strawberry. I also made a bear, possibly coming out of hibernation, wearing knitted arm warmers like I have.

The red ones are a lion costume and a kakapo. They have chubby cheeks. These are pretty bad, but I don't draw too differently when I'm well.

Chomp!

I like Halloween a lot! Too bad it'll be over tomorrow :(. I wanted to do more art but didn't get around to. So here's a sketch I did in like a minute, then hastily (poorly) colored. Explorer bilby bobbing for a donut -- it's apple cider flavored, yum! Please excuse the horrid quality of the picture. It's watercolor on drawing paper with no under sketch again.

Piggy puttering around

A Visayan warty pig shuffles around the house. He likes his slippers and periodicals. There are lots of these guys at the San Diego Zoo; they run around and do funny things. I like their fuzzy hairstyles and interesting tusks. I can never see the warts though. This is a small sepia watercolor doodle. I love the look of brush-inked stuff but seem to have more problems with real ink, so I went with paint and my waterbrush instead. I'm proud that I didn't mess it up, since I didn't make a drawing first, just started with brushstrokes all over.

Musky Odors

I'll only be drawing musk oxen from now on.

OK, probably not, but they sure are fun. Giant heads, so furry, tiny eyes and feet, huge horns. I drew these with an old dying pen after finding an ancient issue of Ranger Rick. Some are slightly changed copies from the photos in the article, some are made up. Ran out of room for entire bodies on the page again, whoopsie!

Costume Time

Halloween is fast approaching; time to come up with crazy costume ideas! I have always liked the cute look of the mock turtle from Alice in Wonderland. Here's a design for a costume of it, modeled by Pinki the bilby. It didn't take long to see what an impractical costume it would be, with no fingers and the big hard shell. Plus the hooves had to be big enough for long bilby toes to fit in to. Oh well, it was worth a try.

Small blue pencil drawings, plus a bonus gouached painting!

Banned Book: Little Black Sambo

Here's where all the tigers are from. I had this book when I was pretty young. I don't know where it came from, it looked old when I got it, but I loved the illustrations. The story was fun too; tigers wearing clothes and it ends with pancakes. This book is banned for the obvious racist connotation of the title, even though it was originally a little boy from India. As time went on, the character changed to African, with many versions having stereotypical depictions of Sambo (black face, "native" type dress.) There's a Little Golden Book with very cute tigers but a grass-skirted Sambo illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren, who did the Poky Little Puppy and others.

We have a few updated versions of the book at the library, one renamed just Sam and one giving him an Indian name. My favorite image from the story is the tiger with shoes on his ears. Probably because the shoes were purple and had curly toes and he just looked really cute. Poor tigers turn into butter at the end though!

Latest fashion

My final illustration for the week. Purple curly shoes are fun. Each of these pictures took about an hour from first scribble to last brushstroke. This one didn't scan the colors as well. I made the sky pink because I got a pink paint splash on this half of the paper and didn't want to try to remove it since it had fully dried. This image is my favorite from the story, and this is what I really wanted to paint. I'm not satisfied with how it came out, but what artist ever is?

Tiger, Red Coat, Burning Bright

The third picture in the group of four. This jacket looks rather Michael Jacksony, doesn't it? I used some old National Geographics for background inspiration, just like Carl Barks did.

Blue Rear View

Another illustration for the same story as yesterday. Harem pants are making a comeback, you know! Just like last time, watercolor over blue sketch. Man, this is a bright orange. I like the way this tiger came out more than the first one.

So Many Raindrops

The first in a series of four tiny paintings to be done in honor of Banned Books Week. I'm going to do one every day until Thursday. They are all from the same book, to be revealed on Friday. These might be preliminaries for bigger pictures, or I'll finish them and forget about them forever. Yay for setting goals!

This tiger has the biggest head ever! Rain is hard to paint, and the puddles look better in the real painting. I wanted to use my bright crazy orange. This was sketched with blue pencil then painted directly with watercolor on half a sheet in my 7-ish" by 9.5-ish" sketchbook. Oh yeah, umbrellas are also hard to draw.

They don't really live in water

Defassa waterbucks! They're very fuzzy and have Vulcan eyebrows and are like real-life Care Bear cousins because they have heart-shaped noses. The male is magic because he's somehow in front of the female and behind her at the same time. Very quick gouache doodle on handmade paper, kind of stylized but not really. After painting these I noticed that they're colored like foxes.

Pushmi-pullyu

The pushmi-pullyu is an antelopey creature with two heads on opposite sides of its body. I made mine a blackbuck because I like their coloring and twisty horns. I enjoy drawing ungulates a lot. It's fun to make hooves and horns and skinny legs, and many of them have such cool coats. I will be painting more hoofstock soon!

See the painting in my blog's header. Gouache on magical brown sketchbook paper; I need to get another of these! They're fun! Gouache works well on this since I can subtract paint and let the brown show through for highlights. The original sketch is in blue pencil. You can see all the leg positions I tried and how I didn't finish drawing the horns.


2 YEARS LATER EDIT: Now that I've changed the header, I've added the pushmi-pullyu painting for easy reference.

A sailor travels to many lands...

I'm pretending I'm an children's book illustrator from the 1950's . Here is an indri based on an old illustration of one in an animal book I have, wearing the duck's sailor outfit right out of the Richard Scarry book Rabbit and His Friends. Boy, I love this book! The pictures are so cute and fun, and the end is so happy that it makes me want to cry. It's done in a different in style than his later work; the pictures are more "primitive", for lack of a better description, and feel spontaneous and loose and sketchy. I've based a painting on this book before; the title doesn't tell you that it's about a platypus.

Indri are cute lemurs that have little teddy bear tails and ears. This is painted with gouache on some handmade paper in a sketchbook that I probably shouldn't have used since it's pretty thin. Don't disintegrate, page!

How now, black chow?

At the feed store that I used to go to almost every week to stare at the puppies and baby chicks and things, there was a "shop dog" -- a black chow named Woo. He was really laid back, mostly lounging around in the store somewhere. I'd call his name and he'd put his head up, trot over and let me pet him a while, then walk away again to go sleep somewhere else.

I did a little sketch of a chow, then added dragon horns at the last minute. I decided to ink it with a brush (I didn't do a very good job). Then I decided to paint it (also not very neatly done). I think this chow dragon should be named Woo too, because that's the best chow name.

Little Water Bears

I like tardigrades, don't you? They're adorable microscopic animals that live in water. I've never seen a real one, though I tried when I had access to high-powered microscopes. I collected so much moss and pond water, but came up empty. They're also know as water bears, can live in environmental extremes and can survive being dehydrated for years. Look up some movies of them walking around, they're so cute!

Tardigrades have 8 chubby legs with tiny claws/toes. I experimented with some designs for these little critters. I even made one furry like a true bear. These are fun to draw; I'll probably do some more. Colorful little gummy water bears! Everybody should try drawing some now.

Can you caricaturize animals?

A visit to the Comic Con this weekend made me want to do art. So many different styles and weird pictures to inspire, but at the same time make me tired of my own stuff. I got a sketch of me from Mr. John Kricfalusi. I like watching how different artists work. He took off his glasses and looked very intently at his subjects with the most serious expression. Then he suddenly got a huge smile and started drawing really quickly; he must've found what he wanted to exaggerate in the drawing.

I do like Stimpy but he seems to have lost his arms in a horrible accident. At least he's happy to see me! His pictures were all so funny, and I'm impressed by the speed and artistic confidence (all done with Sharpie, with no timid sketchiness or pencil underdrawings.) I also got an adorable sketch from Kali Fontecchio; look how cute I am with my favorite duck friend!

Since I still have a hard time drawing people, I wondered if animals can be caricatured in the same way. I think of lot of regular caricature has to do with expression, which some animals don't seem to have. Many of them look dignified or majestic all the time, with straight lines for mouths and big dark eyes with no eyebrows. Or they already look funny to us so they seem to be a naturally-occurring caricature.

Animals are turned into cartoons, but that's more of a representation of every member of that species, not a certain individual. Gao Gao is a giant panda at the San Diego Zoo. He's cute like all pandas, but has a tiny ear that I thought might give me something to work with. He also seems to have big paws. Is this a caricature or just a slightly stylized panda? I don't know but at least I made a picture!

Pretty Kitty

A failed color/style test for another picture that I probably will never make that ended up looking like everything I always draw. I thought the pen was waterproof but it turned out not to be. Whoops. Her siamese points also weren't as purple when I mixed the color, which separated as the paint dried. Kind of cool I suppose.

Best Drawing Ever Made!

Wow, it's been quite a while! I'm so uninspired these days. I want to do art but I don't know what to make. However, I did make this doodle which I feel is my best work ever. It took like 10 seconds but I just like it.