It’s day four of my sketchbook animal series! Sometimes drawing accurate depictions of creatures gets to be too much for me (I am a cartoonist, after all) and I just have to draw something silly. Here are some of those, all in one variation or another of ink and coloured pencil.
First up, we had a prompt in the Zooly Weekly Art Challenge group on Facebook to do “mashups”. I had so much fun I did two! And then tried to figure out what to call them.
I had never done a mashup before, although I had made up some weird aliens from time to time. I grabbed half a dozen of the animal models off my shelf (trying for ones I was sure would be a challenge to put together), and started drawing. The fun part came when I challenged my friends to come up with a name!This one doesn’t have quite so many influences, but is still just as absurd! I wanted to include a bit more scenery to give it a feeling of something you might actually meet out in the wild.Then there are the times I just can’t resist playing with a pun. The prompt for this one was “cuttlefish”, which I always hear as “cuddlefish”. I happened to be at a convention all that day, and without any reference (my phone was dead, oh no!) so I just did one pretty much from memory. I fixed a couple of details when I got home. I was in a cartooning mood that day (something about being at a comics convention, I guess) and I was playing catchup with the prompts. I always kind of wondered why Lassie was such a Good Dog, and what she was really thinking.This is an older sketchbook entry, from 2018, but I couldn’t resist tarting it up a bit in Procreate and including it here. The funny thing about this one is that it actually started life as a rock formation — I was at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, and there was a drawing activity for artists in the Museum (which was soooo fun). Unfortunately, I had just settled down to draw this cool rock formation when our group had to move on to the next stop (it was a very complicated formation). So that became the top of the head and the eyes, and I just let my imagination take over from there.
Hope this brought a little humour into your life! Why not try a mashup or an animal comic of your own? I’ll be back tomorrow with more animal art. See you then!
Karen Gillmore Art 