Sea Legs

Another acrylic underpainting/watercolor overpainting experiment. This one is even less successful than the first, but look how determined the coelacanth is to finish the race!

Somewhere in the jungle...

I haven't done any painting in a long time. I saw a blog showing the progress of a picture done in acrylic and watercolor. My acrylics haven't been touched in forever, so I thought I'd give it a try. He first built up some values with washes of purpley-gray acrylic. Then, he did flat washes of watercolor, without varying the intensity of the paint, letting the underpainting determine the shadows. The end result was very soft with subtle colors.

I wasn't too successful in this first attempt, since I think I worked too small and lost a lot of the details of the original sketch (her bone bracelet, her eyebrow and most of the curls of hair and fur). I have no idea what this picture means; I needed something to paint and this girl in a linsang skin with a strange skull was the first thing I drew. I'd like to play around with this technique some more soon. The drawing is done in a brown colored pencil, which might not have been the best thing to use but I wanted an uninked image.

Happy Lunar New Year, Moon Bear

I haven't painted in a while. This doesn't count as a "real" painting but I dragged a brush full of gouache around on paper so there you go. I wanted to use my black sketchbook, and I wanted to paint something mostly black. This is an Asian black bear, also know as a moon bear (cool name, huh?). They have a fun white V on their chest and wide-looking heads. I wish I had exaggerated the head and big ears even more, actually. I was going to make the bear holding something but couldn't decide on what, so now it's making some kind of weird bear hand sign.

I blame anatomical mistakes on my laziness of just painting away without making a sketch first.

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.

Christmas Cocktail

Oops, it's been a while since I've posted. There are 2 French hens in the 12 Days of Christmas and no rooster, but here he is anyway. This is a present for my great-aunt who collects rooster-related things. I used a weird piece of paper that's really rough, so I couldn't blend colors on it very well. It sucked all the water out of my brush and made for very dry strokes. It looks likes a slightly different style because of that.

I used a book of fancy poultry breeds for reference; there sure are some cute ones. Though this is no particular variety.

Macaque Attack

Just a bit of fooling around on the computer, using some weird coloring style where I made big blurry blobs of color then scribbly lines over them. And once again, I got tired of using the tablet after about 5 minutes and didn't do any detailing. Snow monkeys can get cold too!

Inspired by a National Geographic wallpaper I downloaded.

Chubbicorn

No other presentable art at the moment, other than this scratchy doodle of a chunky palomino unicorn. I love horses with fluffy feet!

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).

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.

Prickly Peccaries

I got some blue lead for my mechanical pencil. It's a change from my usual purple pencil, but it's fun -- a bit harder than I usually work with. This is a sketch of an idea that I've had doodled in my sketchbook for a year or so. Seeing some peccaries at the San Diego Zoo reminded me of it, so I tightened it up. They like eating prickly pear cacti.

Stupid bug, you go squish now!

Here's a painting of the elusive Jurassic griffin, trying to catch one of those giant dragonflies that were everywhere in dino-times. The front is an archaeopteryx, the back is a sabertoothed cat. Archaeopteryxes had little claws on their wings, so it looks a bit strange with 2 sets of "hands". The coloring is based on the hoatzin, which also has some tiny fingers, as a chick at least.

I forgot to give it kitty ears though.

Yikes stripes!

Here's an easy way to tell the three species of zebras apart: Plains zebras are green, Mountain zebras are purple, and Grevy's zebras are blue.


Stylized gouache zebras influenced by the art of Mary Blair. I've been playing in my black sketchbook again. I painted this laying on my bed, trying not to let my cat spill the water.

Slow birding day

I haven't painted a bilby in a while. This is a gouache sketch of a bilby looking for some Australian birds. Things to notice:

* The tiny tiny bird on the cover of the book is an accurate representation of a species of Australian bird, who can ID it?

* Binoculars are very hard to draw.

* The bird is a Southern emu-wren. It really does have only 6 tail feathers.

There are lots of cute Australian birdies that I want to paint! P.S. My scanner decided to die after many years of service, so this is a picture taken with my camera. I had trouble trying to get it clear but color-accurate.

A>>Z

I have a file of ideas for paintings (actually, I make thumbnails or just write a phrase in one of many sketchbooks). Sometimes I start collecting references, but I have a huge backlog of these. I lost quite a few working sketches and reference photos that I had on the computer a while back when it went kaboom.

Yesterday, I decided to dip into the well and finish one picture. This concept has been floating around for 3 or 4 years now. I consider this more a sketch than a painting because I did it on cheap watercolor paper that can't take too much layering of color. But the basic idea is there. An aardvark gloats over the fact that he's the first animal in the alphabet book, and the zorilla is the last. Background looks yucky because I did it last and the paper kept sucking up the water, making the wash uneven. I do like the aardvark's feet.

Philander opposum!

Four-eyed opossums are cute. They have white eyebrows above their real eyes. Sometimes they wear ties and watches and work long days at the office.

Animals can't have glasses like people because their ears are too high, so they must all wear the little Uncle Scrooge-type nose pinchers.

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.

Dead pinnipeds tell no tales

The Caribbean Monk Seal was declared extinct last week, the only seal to disappear due to humans. The Hawaiian Monk Seal is feared to become extinct as well. This picture is ripped off from, I mean, an homage to Marc Davis' Pirates of the Caribbean painting and this species.

You also get a bonus Arabian Oryx. He has very short horns because I was too close to the top of the page.