Why do an animal sketching alphabet? or How to create a project for yourself

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 drawing is fun

Inspired by the Keeper Chat podcast where they discussed animals from A - Z (https://www.keeperchatpodcast.com/), I decided I could do the same.

I picked an animal for each letter of the alphabet. First I chose animals that I like and are sometimes underrepresented in media in comparison to other darlings (think of elephant, tiger, gorilla). Plus, some of these crowd-pleasers are unexpectedly hard to draw. I wanted to go a bit easier on myself, haha.

But then I realised I wanted to give the audience a bit more context on the animal instead of just a few sketches. And with a lot of species in decline, I wanted to concentrate on vulnerable and endangered species. I wanted to highlight relationships between animals and humans, their impact in culture and history and current threats and conservation challenges.

Searching for a fitting animal for a letter was one of the most fun aspects of creating my curated list. That developed a hilarious touch as I was searching books and internet for animals with a particular letter and got excited when I finally found one that's endangered and made a candidate for the list, yikes!

The sketching process was straight forward, switching between 2H, HB and B pencils, with occasional help of 4B to give it some contrast. Pictures from books and the internet served as references.

For the resume or caption I consulted a bunch of trustable websites like zsl.org, edgeofexistence.org or worldwildlife.org and my books, before extracting the crucial information and summarizing them.

It was good fun! Every day I was excited to write up the small profile of the day's animal.

And here is the rest of the alphabet which I posted on Instagram, but not here yet. I skipped X and Y because of time and they are always unknown and I didn't want to do the maths. But they could have been Xingu river ray and Yangtze river dolphin.

W like Williams Dwarf Gecko

Is also called Turquoise dwarf gecko or in the pet trade electric blue gecko. It only lives in a small area at the foothills of the Uluguru mountains in Tanzania.

Males are bright blue with black spots and a black throat, while females are more bronze to bright green.

They are critically endangered due to their small range and amongst other reason because of the illegal pet trade. It is estimated that between 2004 and 2009 about 15% of the entire population has been collected by poachers to sell them to collectors as pets, around 40.000 animals.

Additionally, logging of the screw pine tree, where they exclusively live on, and the conversion to farmland is shrinking their habitat space. Screw pines are also cut down as miners want to reap the minerals growing underneath them, further destroying the gecko’s habitat.

Z like Zebra Pleco

This fish is a small catfish from the Xingu River in Brazil, an arm of the Amazon river.

It became known in the late 80s through a German and American aquarium magazine where it was featured. It quickly became a favourite among hobbyists in the early 2000s and is now an endangered species.

The export is now illegal, but sometimes the fish is trafficked illegally through neighbouring countries.

Closure

I hope you too had fun following me on this adventure! Who knows, maybe I will do something like it again this year!

After spending a lot of time in front of my iPad drawing digital art, like my comic, it was a welcome pleasure to go traditional and use my pencils again. Nothing beats the friction and scratching of pencil nibs on paper! One of the best feelings!

Let me know what you think!

Stay curious,

Andi Pasti