Andi Pasti's Animal Art

You might have seen that one on an episode of "One Planet". A bird searching for spiders and receiving an unpleasant turn. This scene was genuinely one of the most surprising outcomes in a natural story on television, even for a long-time-nature-documentary-watcher like me. The spider-tailed horned viper is a quite recent, but extraordinary discovery. It evolved modified scales on the tail that form a tail tip resembling a spider. Camouflaged against the rocks of Iran, it imitates spider movements to attract birds which want to feed on spiders. In a split-second the snake attacks with its venomous fangs to kill the bird. The viper was actually first known to the Western world in 1968, where it was captured and investigated in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, USA. Back then, the weird and unhealthy looking tail end was written off as a spider attached to the snake, and later regarded as a deformation or tumour. Only later in 2003, when another specimen was found...

Earlier this year I set myself the goal to print my comic Woolly Wonderful . Even though I finished a digital version almost 2 years ago, for a long time I did not think about getting it printed. It was only through my contribution to the WIP Comics Anthology in 2025 , and meeting with other comic creators who brought along their work in person, where in contrast I did not have anything to show physically. These experiences finally convinced me to give it a go. Especially the learnings and guidance through the comics group and my participation in the anthology last year helped me to better understand the printing process. My comic was drawn entirely in Procreate on the iPad. Here are some tips for getting your comic ready for print: St art with the correct format and DPI Procreate has a template named "Comic", but what is odd about it, is the preconfigured DPI (dots per inch) of 400. Dots per inch means how many ink dots per inch (2,56 cm) the printer will use when printing o...

Porcupines are well known, easily identifiable by the massive amount of quills covering their body. Which always and immediately raises the question on how they mate. Well, in short, very carefully. But what about the stages right before that? The first look, the first conversation, the first kiss and bonding on emotional level? Find out! And before you wonder: no, porcupines can not shoot their quills like darts! They fall off or break when predators attack them so they get stuck in their skin. Thanks for asking. The comic - porcupines dating African porcupines form a lifelong bond and can mate several times a year. Because porcupines are equipped with their sharp quills, intercourse is very dangerous. Therefore the female initiates by presenting her back. Gestation period is  around 3 months with a litter of up to four pups, called porcupettes (adorable name, isn’t it?). Because these porcupines are mostly active at night, and although pairs are kept in captivity, scientists and ...

I am contributing a comic to this year’s anthology of my comic group. Over 60 creators around the UK will contribute to another magnificent book. The theme of the current book is infinity/loop, so comics will cover anything about infinite repetition and variety. We are running a kickstarter to crowd fund the book and there are less than 10 days left. If you are interested into indie comics and want to support us, please consider backing the project. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mike-armstrong/the-new-wip-comics-anthology Thank you, Andi Pasti

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 Thought Bubble 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

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 I had enough spare time). (Click on the image to view a bigger version) What is even more exciting for 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 been bothe...

A few of my brain cells worked together and came up with a little, funny animal comic about a hunting cheetah (see more posts about animals ). 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. Is there an animal and a behaviour you would like to see in a comic? Fancy another funny comic? Click here . Or have you read my greatest art achievement yet ? Thanks for reading and till next time, Andi Pasti

To bridge the gap between the published first issue of Woolly Wonderful and creating an engaging story, I used the time to draw some sort of concept that I imagined for a second issue. I tried a slightly different process this time (compared to the one I explained earlier ), to find out if I could save some time in the comic page creation. complete illustration Usually after the pencil stage, the inking will be done, either over very detailed pencils or rougher pencils, depending on the artist’s confidence. But ink will not give you any variance in tone like pencils can give you. Thus, some artists only have a pencil stage and darken the pencils afterwards to make them more stand-out. Any thin or weaker lines will still be visible with a still lighter tone and might give it a bit of a rougher finish to it. This indeed can help to make the art appear less digital.  sketch pencils complete pencils with shadow layer The picture in general has more of a children’s book feeling about it...

People who are not familiar with the artistic process might perceive the creation of art I as some sort of magical act. That we artists just make some confident marks from our imagination and *bam* the masterpiece is done. And even for me, now that I have finished issue 1 of my comic Woolly Wonderful , it seems unbelievably far away and odd when I laid down my first sketches. That notion might even be strengthened when watching artists like Kim Jung Gi who created huge masterworks in ink straight from their mind onto paper. Of course they are not magicians, even if it seems so. They just trained long enough. They have drawn many subjects over and over again until they don’t need references or guiding lines any more. So to reduce the fear of starting a comic page, I will reflect on my process for creating a comic page for Woolly Wonderful. Creating the Layout and Thumbnailing Initial layout and thumbnails Before getting to any pencil work on a comic page it is important to have a rough...

Hey folks, After what seems like an eternity I can finally present you the first issue of my comic Woolly Wonderful . This comic is a start of an idea’s realisation I had some years ago, I will post more about that soon. Let me just say, I gained massive respect for comic creators now that I experienced myself what a journey it is. But it is also a rewarding one. I started this project without a lot of drawing experience or let alone how to do comics. Some pages indeed took me more than 22 hours, with others I got more lucky by just 12 hours. But it does not have to be that way, a simpler style would do it for some people, or maybe even my future self. To make the comic more accessible to new blog visitors, I’ve moved it to  https://andi-pasti-art.blogspot.com/p/woolly-wonderful-issue-1.html . Please enjoy! Enjoy the cover: Stay inspired, Andi Pasti

I am quite delighted to say that all pages have been inked and coloured. I only need to do small corrections, letter in all the text and create a cover for this issue. I already figured out how to add speech bubbles conveniently in Clip Studio Paint. Amazing 🤩  The comic will be released on this blog, hopefully in late February, early March if my time management and ambition is not too far off. The Christmas period and summer are always times where you don’t get much done, so the finalisation of my sweet graphical adventure dragged on a bit. Life, eh? I even have great ideas for the 2nd issue and just need to bring them together into a sensibly long story. Stay tuned, Andi Pasti Update: want to read the finished first issue? -> Here

I haven’t posted about my latest progress on working on my comic yet. The last time was end of 2021 . The good news is: I finally settled on a title! Yeah! It will be called Woolly Wonderful . Woolly will also be the name of the main character, that is one that a child would give its toys, not too complicated and overloaded and quite obvious based on its appearance. Here is Woolly and one of the comic pages: Sample comic page. Copyright: Andi Pasti I have pencilled, inked and coloured 11 out of 16 pages. Although I am sure I have to tweak some of these pages a bit still. I also rearranged the layouts of the last 3 pages last summer and did more pencilling. I condensed the story and brought elements meant for issue 2 into the current issue, which created a more interesting ending and brings the story forward. Some of the last pages need still to be inked as well. Which leads me to think again about my workflow for the next issue. Using pencils and ink pens helped me to refine the final ...

The big question when writing a comic is: how long should it be? How many pages in total? The truth is, I don’t know exactly. I don’t know how long the story will be and how many pages I need to draw. Based on the high expectations we all have about us and our creative stories I maybe don’t want to know. This said, I don’t want to fall into this trap creating an overblown project that I start eagerly with motivation, but lose interest along the way and nobody gets to see. So I am trying to follow the Minimal Viable Story approach here, kind of. I actually want to finish stuff. So I decided to divide the story in approachable chunks, more precise several issues that I produce and publish after another. This way I run the circle of writing the script, making layouts, pencilling, inking, colouring, filling in word boxes in smaller timelines and repeating it multiple times. Which means I even could learn from my past mistakes when preparing the next issue. Some of these thoughts came throu...

Hello dear reader, welcome to my blog. I am glad you found me among the enormous amount of other blogs around the world. I will keep this introduction short: I am not (yet) a professional illustrator, also I can't execute this hobby at full-time. But that's not a big deal. Nevertheless I am eager to create amazing drawings and step up my game with the line and shading wizardry. Amongst the occasional animal, or maybe even a dinosaur drawing, you will find progress on my comic creations documented. I haven't been into comics really big for a long time, but I recently found that comics offer a different experience and a whole new universe of stories and immersion opened up for me. For your curiosity what this is all about and until the next blog entry, enjoy this little drawing of my woolly puppet that I did as kind of a master study. Influenced by Sophie Campbell: So if you are interested in my process, follow this blog and keep being updated. Cheers, Andi