Andi Pasti's Animal Art

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...

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, to find out if I could save some time in the comic page creation. Finished piece 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.  Main character pencils Pencils complete Pencils with shadow layer The picture in general has more of a children’s book feeling about it, especially through the lighter b...

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, 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. Rough pencils. Woolly sitting in the Dad room reading. Before getting to any pencil work on a comic page it is important to have a rough layout of each page. That way you can envision the panel flow and how your story turns out visually. Think of it as storyboarding a movie. You don’t need ...

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. ...