Hey, Let’s Draw Animals!

July 25, 2017 · by karencomics · in art challenge, Drawing-a-Day, Watercolour, zooly. ·

There is one week left of the Zooly Art Challenge — if you still want to try drawing/painting/sculpting/whatever some critters, there’s still time to jump in! And good news — everyone is enjoying it so much that we’ve decided to continue by setting up an associated group with a weekly challenge. We’ll also be leaving up the page (hoping to do it again next July), and anyone is welcome to do their own self-directed challenge at anytime and post their work in the prompt-animal threads.

Here are mine for the last few days — I’ve been continuing my personal quest of painting without a net — that is, without a preliminary drawing. I’ve included links to my references, mostly sourced from the internet, so you can extrapolate the path from where I came from to where I ended up!

A Wolverine — I did an in-progress sequence of photos for my every-other-week newsletter, which you can sign up for here. This one’s already published, but subscribers have access to all back issues as well. And it’s FREE! This one was referenced mainly from this photo and this one, but I changed a lot and looked at many others besides as I was painting.

A Black-Tailed Jackrabbit, referenced loosely from a Texas Parks and Wildlife photo.

Loosely rendered from this photo here. Check out the wildlife photography on that site; it’s quite wonderful!

OK, I don’t really like this one much. Full disclosure: I even did a bit of digital “fixing” on it. I was working on some really horrible paper — I’m also trying to use up some odds and ends during this challenge, but after doing the coati above and this poor flying fox, I consigned the rest of that pad to the scrap heap! I’ll try again sometime on better paper, because I really liked the photo I was working from; it was just what I envisioned for doing this animal.

I really enjoyed painting this one! And I now want to draw lots of camel faces — they have so much personality. After I looked at lots of pictures on the internet, I remembered that I had a model of the Bactrian Camel, and so I worked from that.

I have a huge collection of animal models by Safari, and they are great to work from. That hand that is about to steal the camel is a casting of my own hand that I did in a sculpture class by my sculptor friend Melanie Furtado . It’s been useful when I need to draw hands and can’t quite turn mine around my wrist enough!

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