Animal Alphabets

Animal Alphabets is the first Twitter art challenge I ever discovered, thanks to DoodleDate.  When I first found it I had the concept a bit wrong and assumed it was just any animal with that week’s letter.  But I quickly caught on.

I found it near the end of a round – each run of the alphabet has a different theme – so waited til the start of the next round to fully join in.  

Sea Life started in January 2019, with Angelfish.  And I was very happy with mine.

I was also happy with my Blue Crab, and my Clownfish which I turned into a robot for part of my Draw 100 Robots challenge.

Dumbo Octopus and Elephant Seal were also adorable.

Fangtooth was a little hard to make cute, but I think rainbow fins and bubbles did a good job.

I have absolutely no idea why I decided to use highlighters for Goblin Shark…

… but I think that’s the point where I decided to take a different approach.

Instead of drawing a full piece for each letter, I was going to do a compilation piece.  One page with little drawings of each animal.

Hourglass Dolphin, Immortal Jellyfish, Japanese Seahorse, King of Herrings, Lobster, Mantis Shrimp. All adorable little creatures.

I even went back and added the animals from A-G.

I’m not sure what happened then.  I got distracted by other projects probably, but I stopped drawing.  I collected the letters.

And I collected some reference images.

I even did a full piece of the Sea Sheep because it’s adorable.

I just never finished the piece.  It sat in my Works In Progress pile for months and months.  It sat there throughout most of the Birds run.  I wasn’t so interested in Birds, so I only did a couple of them.

I did an Emperor Penguin – in baby form because they’re utterly adorable, a Flamingo, a Puffin, and a Robin Red Breast.

And that’s it.  But the latest series is Mythical Creatures – and they interest me a lot!  I want to join in with this one, but I wanted to finish Sea Life first, so I got out my piece from my WIPs pile, and I knuckled down.

I’m quite pleased with it.  Some of the animals have realistic colouring, and some do not – but I kinda established that pattern right at the start with the galaxy Blue Crab.  Some are slightly cuter than others.  But it’s pretty cute overall.

For Mythical Creatures though I think I’m gonna go back to doing individual images.

As I’m writing this (probably a few weeks before posting) the Mythical Creatures run has just started.  I have some reference pictures on my phone.  I’ll try and blog every few letters or so.  Maybe.  Or maybe I’ll wait until sometime next year.