Andi Pasti's Animal Art

Hey, Exciting news!  WIP comics is a community of comic creators around London (and further) who support each other in finishing their comic ideas and finding ways to promote their work or find opportunities to collaborate with writers, artists and publishers. They have been creating an anthology book every year for 7 years now.  I have signed up to contribute a Comic this year. The book is currently in the making and will be sold from November on at the Thoughtbubble convention and online. The preliminary cover, subject to change 60 people will contribute comics around the theme infinity. That means loads of different art styles and interpretations of this year’s theme. If you want to support the project, head over to kickstarter, follow the project and back it when it launches. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mike-armstrong/the-new-wip-comics-anthology Thanks for reading, see you soon! Andi Pasti

This comic is already 4 years old, but I never shared it here... Have you watched the dinosaur show "Chased by dinosaurs" with Nigel Marven, a TV program from 2002?  It was made in the aftermath of "Walking with dinosaurs", which was a huge success in the realms of paleo-documentaries. This time, instead of being a serious documentary, it uses a time-travel approach. It features the wildlife presenter Nigel Marven running around in real locations in search for dinosaurs. Well, and what is hilarious is, he gets frequently too close to these supposedly dangerous animals. In real life, you wouldn't probably do that. So that's why I had to make a parody (and admittedly enough spare time). What is more surprising to me, I met Nigel Marven years later at a Tetzoocon in 2023, report here: https://tetzoo.com/blog/2023/12/15/tetzoocon-2023-the-report Nigel was nice enough to stay around and talk with people, but there was such a huge queue that I couldn't have be...

A few of my brain cells worked together and came up with a little animal gag comic. I think as inspiration I can blame the Keeper Chat podcast where I learned about some interesting cheetah facts that are rarely mentioned in documentaries. Enjoy! I have been dreaming a while now about writing about animals and our relationship or misconceptions about them. But who reads blogs nowadays anyway, huh? So I tried to keep short, funny and a bit educational. Maybe, maybe this is the start of a new project. Thanks for reading and till next time, Andi Pasti

How is it end of February already? I didn't get to update the final of the Animal Advent Calendar as I became more overwhelmed right before Christmas and needed to stop. On top of that, I got sick for a few weeks in January. Learning to draw animals is challenging For a long time it was my desire to draw animals. But with so many shapes and forms it is an immense undertaking to tackle them all, if not impossible. I bought several books and did numerous live drawings. But with live drawings you might often feel overwhelmed because your animal models don’t hold still how you like it. The easiest indeed were reptiles and by chance sleeping piglets, which I could have done a blog post about (darn). Books present a calmer and self directed way of learning. And I did start off with books and some generic body plan drawings, feet and hands. But it’s not the most fun way. And you need a lot of discipline to get through a book. At which it again feels a bit like work.  Animal research and d...

Welcome back to the Animal Advent Calendar on the 4th Advent. We will be looked at what sketches I did for animals starting with letters P - V. P for Philippine Eagle The Philippine eagle lives only on the islands of the Philippines and is the largest eagle followed by the bald eagle from North America, though not as famous. It grows to 1 m length and 7 kg of weight, it also features a nice, extravagant hairdo. They feed on all sorts of medium sized animals like civets, squirrels, deer, birds, lizards, snakes and monkeys. The latter prey brought them their other name, “monkey-eating eagle”, as people have observed them hunting monkeys. Couples hunt together, while one distracts the monkey herd from the front , the other one strikes from the back. Philippine eagles mate for life and only produce one offspring every two years which they nurture 20 months. This slow breeding cycle and their slow maturity of 3-7 years, the eagle is threatened. Human factors like deforestation, mining, agri...

Welcome to the 3rd Advent and back to my Animal Advent Calendar. Today we will be looking at the animal sketches for animals starting with letters I - O.  I for Indri Indris are the largest lemur and endemic to Madagascar, meaning they only live there. They are also called babakoto in the indigenous language, meaning “ancestor of man”, and are protected from consumption. As many species they are threatened by logging and habitat loss, leaving the populations strongly fragmented. If the animals don’t find other animals with different gene pools, the gene pool won’t mix well enough making the new generations vulnerable for diseases. Indris usually live in groups of 2 to 6, a pair with their young. In the morning they can be heard kilometres away in the forest,announcing their presence with wailing, long shouts. Look it up on YouTube, it sounds like a whale over water. J for Jaguar Jaguars are big cats from Middle and South America, often confused with the Leopard. Jaguars are more mu...

This week I posted sketches for the letters B - H of my Animal Advent Calendar on Instagram. Today, the day of the second advent, you will find these sketches in this blog post. Have fun reading! B like Bush Dog Bush dogs are 30cm tall predators from South America with short legs and a long body. They mostly hunt large rodents and armadillos in their forest or savannah habitat. They live in large groups, have several pups per litter, can have young several times a year and fear no natural predators. Sounds like a pretty decent survival strategy.  However, due to residential and commercial building and consequent habitat loss, their prey has less and less space to live. Thus, bush dogs have fewer amounts of animals to prey on. They are also threatened by diseases spread by domestic dogs roaming their territories. These factors resulted in a near threatened classification by the IUCN. C like Cape Buffalo African Cape Buffalo is a large bovid with a distribution across the middle and ...