Studies of a Harbor Seal mom and pup. Plus a doodle of a “fatty” tuna.
Source: Seals referenced from photos on Los Angeles Zoo.
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Archive for August, 2010
30 items.
Studies of a red ruffed lemur baby and adult. The juvenile’s faces are covered with brown fur, but they develop a white patch of fur on top when they mature.
Source: Referenced from videos and photos on Zooborns.com
This is my artist desk as it currently is, nothing moved or cleaned up. The piece of paper taped over top of my comic page is my technique to battle doubting-artist tendencies to continuously go back and tweak/redraw finished panels. Keeping them out of sight lets me focus on moving forward. What’s nice is when I finish the page, I peel off the piece of paper and get to see all the panels together on the page. As you can see, the page rests on a light table — I work over top of storyboards blown up to 11″x 17″, and draw each panel in order until the page is finished. Then I lay another sheet over top of that and draw the word balloons and sound effects.
Other items of interest-
- Laptop – for reference, my character designs, and music.
- Bear figurines – I picked the polar bear adult and cub up at Target in the kid’s toy section. They’re made by Schleich, a company that produces very detailed animal figurines. I find them to be a good three-dimensional reality check for tough angles. The brown bear is a Pocahontas toy, so he’s more stylized than the other two, but still nice.
- Print outs of finished comic pages, for character reference and consistency.
- Rulers, pencils, and erasers – Mechanical pencil, 0.5mm pentel for drawing. Staedtler Mars plastic eraser for general erasing. Magic rub for large mistakes. Tuff Stuff Eraser Stick
for erasing small details (you can find the Tuff Stuff Eraser Stick
- Totoro Art Book
– A breathtaking collection of Hayao Miyazaki Totoro art and production notes. Very inspiring, it serves as a reminder of where I want to be with my artwork. You can find the book on Amazon here.
- Barbie purse – something my mom gave me. A McDonald’s toy I think. It’s for jotting down notes, but I end up just using Post-it notes instead because they’re easier to get to.
- Rabite keychain. Because rabites are awesome.
Studies of black-footed ferret kits. These cute little critters are the endangered wild relatives of the domestic ferret.
Referenced from Smithsonian’s National Zoo photos.
The ferret is one of my favorite animals. I used to share my home with two adorable ferrets–Momoko and Elf. Their crazy antics inspired me to create the three-volume graphic novel series Peach Fuzz
Panel from Peach Fuzz Vol 3, page 92
When I do these daily animal sketches, my goal is to reproduce the animal’s features so that I can improve my grasp on the anatomy. In contrast, the ferrets in Peach Fuzz are very stylized, with three-clawed paws, streamlined bodies, and big eyes, to suit the comical tone of the story. The animals in The Last of the Polar Bears are also stylized, but to a much lesser degree, to fit the story’s more dramatic tone.
If you’re enjoying The Last of the Polar Bears so far, you might also enjoy my previous work, Peach Fuzz, a three-volume graphic novel series about a prissy ferret named Peach who thinks she’s a princess.
