Studio Practice: Playbook Reflection - Zoo Task

Initially I began this task by drawing the red pandas quite quickly but also literally, trying to get the right colour tones of the animal. Whilst this served me pretty well for a few I realised I would get bored soon and wouldn't be able to keep this up for 95 more. I began to loosen my style, making the red pandas more creative and cooky.

One of the more literal pandas

Getting more stylised

From looking at all the images of red pandas Google had to offer I decided that the main feature I would keep including was the long bushy, usually stripey tail, I think this, along with spiky ears and claws helped somewhat keep the red panda identity despite how far I strayed from the original reference images sometimes.

Quite childlike in style

I really enjoyed using acrylic paint for this task, I was able to achieve bold solid colours, perfect for the characteristic stripes. I also started to experiment with coloured paper, using different coloured pencils on top and seeing what effects I could create with this. Some of my favourite drawings from the 100 were created this way, I liked testing how minimal I could make my markmaking yet still make the animal recognisable.

The black worked well as both the white for the claws and stripes, and the blue for the legs was clearly visible

After half way I was starting to run out of inspiration. I decided to try some collage. Due to the time constraints I chose to stick to fairly minimalistic collage, using only block coloured paper and embellishing it with simple coloured pencil marks.

Me at the half way point

I thought it would be fun to try experimenting with how I could develop the red panda as a character with human like qualities. I tried using the tail as a 'scarf', and making the face seem more humorous and fun, exaggerating its eyes and whiskers, trying to make a narrative for the animal.

Tail scarves and bowler hats

I drew this guy on my birthday

Towards the end I was really motivated and the pace was a lot quicker than during the rest of the task which I didn't expect. I found doing the more stylised illustrations a lot more fun than trying to mirror the photograph. The hardest aspect of this was trying to capture the red pandas face, the fur patterns made this difficult to draw in a minimalistic style, so I think some of my drawings possibly resemble lemurs and raccoons as oppose to red pandas. One of the most interesting things is that due to a small number of decent reference imagery, most of these illustrations were made using the same reference photos, yet they have each turned out completely differently, linked maybe by the stance or positioning of the animal. At first 100 drawings seemed like a daunting task, but especially towards the end I really got into it and I think it was a hugely beneficial exercise of developing and adapting the ways in which I draw in a specific time frame. I tried not to stay too precious in order to keep up the pace of drawing, which in some images became a strength.