Andi Pasti's Animal Art

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. Enough of the long words, please enjoy the following pages. You can click on the first image and then cycle through the next pages with the arrow keys on your keyboard. Let's goooo... I hope you enjoyed issue 1 and please let me know. You can post a comment here or contact me on instagram at @andi_past_art. Woolly is looking forward ...

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

I haven’t posted about my latest progress on working on my comic yet. 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: Andreas Adam 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 outlines, but is quite time in...

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. ...

In January and February I attended live drawing sessions organised by Wildlifedrawing.co.uk . That was actually a lucky find, since I love animals and they are probably the most interesting topic to draw (for me). And it allowed me to engage in a group of people mesmerised and amazed by our wild muses. The first session was handling rescued reptiles consisting of a tortoise, corn snake, leopard gecko, bearded dragon and a green iguana named Deano who loved a good scratch. Honestly, he really enjoyed being petted and scratched. Usually I start a drawing too small, so this time I started sketching big which was quite the wrong approach. Considering you want to catch the form and appearance of moving animals, it’s probably best to  make small sketches, so you don’t need to move your pencil too far enough. One abandoned sketch I did want to finish as a proper drawing then in the following week after the session. Drawing all the scales was quite time intense, so I learned to appreciate ...

Last year I drew a Centrosaurus with ink and grey markers on brown-toned paper. I’ve bought that paper two years ago and never used it properly, but I figured out that it’s quite handy. With a mid-toned paper you only need to care about shadows and highlights because the mid-tone is already provided by the paper itself. On white background you have to establish this mid-tone yourself. I decide to use this paper block to fill it with dinosaurs drawn in that style. Centrosaurus Over the past year I tried to fill the pages with some species that I like, not the usual ones that get much media attention. Dilophosaurus - without the frill and spitting poison  Therizinosaurus Technically I discovered some challenges which tampered with my joy: * I use some black fine liners from Faber-Castell, 0.1-0.3 mm for the outlines or black shadows. These are fine! * for whites I use a gel pen, probably low quality, as the ink gets stuck from moment to moment and is not flowing constantly and reliab...

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...