After doing a little research I had more of an idea of what I wanted to look into. I began to do research on specific animals. I used websites of organisations like WWF or BORN FREE to gather information on these animals. My main focus was the different threats to these animals. I accompanied the research with drawings. the purpose of this was to play with different mediums as well as get myself familiar with the animals.
I really enjoyed doing all of these. The fine liners allowed me to work quickly but also make bolder marks, I found that doing this I was not worrying about making the drawing look good, this made it much more enjoyable. With the rhino and elephant, I used the red fine liner (as it reminded me of blood) to do the images where the animals tusks were taken away (poached). i really liked the look of this, but i thought that layering the drawings like i did with the elephants was slightly confusing and took away from the lost trunks.
I decided to try some digital experimentation. so i made a drawing of the jaguar on paper very simple so I could edit it on photoshop to separate the linework from the white background before drawing.
this jaguar drawing I definitely spent way too long on. however it was really fun. I hadn’t used photoshop to draw in a few months so doing this got me familiar with the program again. I learnt more about working with layers, as well as using different brushes and using the smoothing tool.
in the future I think I will use photoshop to draw like this more often. However I would probably be less detailed than this, as doing multiple of these would only allow me to create a small quantity of work.
