100 Mammals IV: A New Hope

A river dolphin eating jellybeans. They were hard to paint since each is about one millimeter long. I have a hat like this; it's warm but I look like a crazy person wearing it. You can't tell, but there's a thistle stuck on the side (not a feature of my hat).

Hyraxes are funny, though this doesn't look especially like one. This one likes eating defunct brands of chocolate sandwich cookies that almost sound like her name. I've never liked Oreos, but Hydroxes were good.

This is a sea lion, not a seal. Because it has earmuffs on, meaning it must have external ears under there. That's a nacho, by the way. With guacamole and some specks of salsa that seem to have disappeared.

This rhino is wearing some kind of weird gloves. She's drinking a green boba.

A caracal enjoying a broccoli tree with ranch dressing on it.

My Li'l Mammals

A leaf-nosed bat contemplates a tiny pickle.

A sweater-vested dugong with a corndog. I thought the orange slice on the sweater was unclear, so I gave it an orange charm bracelet too.

A pangolin with a milk shake -- the kind you can stir yourself in the metal cup.

A colugo, or flying lemur, eats popcorn. Popcorn is hard to paint.

Last up, a mountain goat with a deviled egg. That's a pear on the scarf.

More mammals (More-mals?)

First up this time, a bushbaby. I forgot what a shrimp scampi looked like when I was painting this. It seemed weird to make a bushbaby with little eyes.

This is a tree shrew. It's having some hot chocolate with marshmallows.

Here's a quoll enjoying a mint-chip ice cream cone. I was into little animals with long bushy tails I guess!

I have a jacket just like this pretzel-eating moonrat's! I don't want to paint too many animals with a lot of black or dark brown, since that's hard to make them show up on the black paper.

Two-toed sloths are slightly less known than their three-toed cousins. This one is gnawing on a strip of bacon, by the way. When I get too tiny, I lose the details! I should get one of those brushes made with one hair.

100 Furry Milk-drinkers

Ah, a new art challenge for myself. I wanted to use gouache, and got out my black sketchbook. I painted this little elephant drinking strawberry milk first, and was inspired to try to paint 100 tiny pictures. Now, a few things I like are mammals, cute things, and food. So, what better to make than 100 tiny mammals with food! A came up with a few guidelines: each mammal will be different, each will be holding a food or drink item, each will have some kind of clothes or other body adornment, each will have tiny indigo dots for eyes, each will have a fruit or flower somewhere, and each will have pink cheeks. Phew, that's a lot!

I figured if I did five a day, I'd be done by the end of the month. I don't know if I'll keep up that pace, but the first five were completed. Each painting is about an inch high, so these are scanned at five times actual size or so. This makes all errors even more glaring. While the elephant is highly stylized, the next few are getting more detail.

The beaver is using cob knobs! All of these have my trademark microscopic white eye highlight.

This echidna is eating one of those twisty unicorn pops. You can't really see the little toe nail ring on one foot.

This is a pika, if you can't tell. She's holding a blueberry muffin (maybe just the muffin top).

The last painting I did is of an aardvark with a beret and a loaf of french bread. Bonjour!

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.

Ho ho!

I've had this idea for a while, and just got around to sketching it. I think this would make a fun button set -- animals with double names. I can't think of a good title; it seems that there are lots of words that have rhyming syllables but I can't think of any with repeated syllables.

There are a few more birds that fit this category (dodo being the most obvious) but I didn't want too many of them. I like motmots a lot. Did you know that they make their tail feathers look like this? They pull bits off to make the little spatulas.

Dikdiks are quite a bit skinner than this one but I was trying for more cartoony. The cuscus is my favorite drawing of all. It would be fun to do these again, or some more. I just like to get the idea down before it's lost to the ages like so many of the artwork I see in my head but never record. These are tiny watercolor paintings with purple inking, by the way.

New Year, Old Art

The computer was out of commission for a while from right after my last post until now. I wanted to put up the last picture I did in 2009. It's a family a raptory dinosaurs of indeterminate species. Yeah, the father dinos probably didn't stick around raising the babies, but I wanted to draw him anyway. They're based on grebes. Ink sketch with messy watercoloring.

Christmas Cheer!

Happy Christmas one and all! Reindeer are cute with their giant heads and spread toes. Sometimes they have white faces and pinto spots. Experimenting with some weird stylization on the legs; a drying-out red pen and watercolor drawing in a sketchbook.

Going the way of the dodo

I painted this little picture sitting on my bed listening to mariachi music. The idea was from a receipt by my bed that I scribbled "angel dodo" on when I woke up in the middle of the night once. Double wings are weird, but I wanted to have it flying. I based the coloring in part on the bleeding heart dove. I was going to give it a halo of feathers like a crowned pigeon; then I decided that was going overboard with the Columbidae and religious imagery.

I got a new pen that's supposed to be gray ink (it's really a permanent Martha Stewart scrapbooking pen). I'm disappointed that it's not as light as I wanted. It looks like slightly faded black ink. Martha, how could you! I should've got the indigo or heliotrope one.

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.

Why don't you take a picture, it'll last longer!

I'm rusty with gouache! I acquired some postcard-sized pieces of brown paper which I thought would be good for gouache. I was watching Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and thought it would be fun to do a series of little paintings of some of my favorite movies. This is from a scene where Pee-Wee is dressed as a woman to escape the cops. As you can see, I did extensive research for no reason.

Here's a frame I took from the movie that lasts about 1 1/2 seconds so I could get a good look at his shoes.

Here's the inspiration for the painting.

I had wanted him to look more generic, since I wasn't going for a perfect likeness of Pee-Wee; I want the clothes to be recognizable but not necessarily the face. Oh well, I may do some more to practice.

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?