Andi Pasti's Animal Art

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 ...

For a long time I wanted to learn how to draw animals, but since there are so many different groups coming with different forms, it was challenging to pin down what animal actually  to draw when you have your sketchbook and pencil in front of you. So I decided to pick an animal for each letter of the alphabet and post the sketches on each day of December leading up to and going over till the end of Christmas. The alphabet has 26 letters, no kidding, which falls perfectly in place with the end of Christmas on the 26th. My own animal advent calendar. For me, and also for you. Starting with … A for Axolotl The Axolotl is a extraordinary amphibian, home to only a few lakes in Mexico. This narrow distribution makes them a critically  endangered animal, and although a lot of individuals are held in aquariums and zoos all over the world, their numbers in their natural habitat are shrinking.  They undergo different stages of development like frogs, but they will stay in their juv...

I recently finished a longer project that I started as part of a Domestika course. The style of that particular course gathered my interest, because it reminded me of older illustrations in animal books or natural history books. As tools only a ballpoint pen was used, except from sketching in pencil. That meant all the textures were done with a huge and varying amount of strokes. The course teaches you how to achieve different textures. And also, don’t be afraid to make mistakes, they will happen. This is the resulting image: The animal of choice This is the Resplendent Quetzal , one of the 6 subspecies of Quetzal. They all live in the area of Middle and South America, in higher altitudes that feature foggy rain forests.  I chose this bird because of its sheer beauty. It was featured on a foreword page in one of the best animal books I had as a child (it featured 2000 vertebrates) and kept it long into my adulthood until the binding fell apart, so it left a huge impression on me. ...