Hybrids

Speedball ink with brush and nib pens on butcher paper

Nov. 2010

Speedball ink with brush and nib pens and pilot rolling ball pen in sketchbook

Nov. 2010

Here is a slew of animal/human doodles. I'm still distilling the buffalo in clothing idea--she is the animal character I am most excited to learn more about through drawing her and her world, but here are some of her compatriots. This 1960s lioness has been intriguing me recently. I started drawing a lion face one day in my sketchbook, and her mane just became a 1960s flip-do, which got me interested in what fashionable suits she might wear, and the rest went from there...

The antelope/giraffe drawing stemmed from thoughts about sacrifices for fashion. The story that was running in my head is that the giraffe wants to be fashionable with a bow around her neck like the antelope, but she tried too hard to make her long neck fit into the fashion ideal of the shorter antelope neck. Here, the fashion sacrifice becomes humerous.

Some of these characters are really a hybrid of animal and human, and some of them are just animals doing human things. The difference between these types of characters, I think, can be the different between creepy and cute, or between mythological (think minotaur, centaur, etc) and storybook. Anyways, all good tangents to go on, many things to think about...