Animal Kingdom Sketches 2020

Approximately five and a half million years ago*, my family and I went to Walt Disney World.  As usual, I took loads of photos at Animal Kingdom and did sketches of the residents.  Mostly birds, of course.  Enjoy:







* - It sure feels like.  In reality it was only three weeks ago which seems impossible.  I'd like to do a trip report once it doesn't feel like a big fun and exciting blur that happened ages ago.

Animal Kingdom Sketches 2019

Brought my Illo on an adventure to Disney's Animal Kingdom and Animal Kingdom Lodge!

A Self-Imposed Challenge at Maine Wildlife Park

For want of a more interesting term, I'm going to call this the Little/Big Challenge.  Do quick little sketches of the Charismatic Megafauna and long, detailed studies of the small, unpopular animals.  If I may say so myself, I think the results are a-pretty good:

Sketches from the National Zoo

To keep things succinct, let me just say that the National Zoo is more awesome than I ever expected.

The Dogs of DC

Recent family events brought me to Washington DC for a while.  I managed to carve out enough time to draw some of the animals there.  Here are all the cool dogs we met walking around the city:
















Next week, sketches from the National Zoo!

Sketching at the Maine Wildlife Park

This one's a nice picture-heavy, text-light one.



The Maine Wildlife Park in Gray, Maine is another of my absolute favorite places to sketch. There's no real substitute for sketching from life. Especially when you run into a good model like this porcupine:



And this moose:



The Park is run by the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and started out as a facility for raising game birds like pheasants and turkeys. Formerly known as the Gray Game Farm, it expanded it's purpose to rehabilitating injured animals of all species.



Today, the Wildlife Park serves as a shelter and rehabilitation center for wild animals who, for some reason or other, cannot survive outside the zoo. Representative species of most New England mammals are one of the Park's highlights. (Though you will probably run into some Hazards of Sketching In Public, like I did. See the quote I overheard in the page below. And the dreaded All Animals are Domesticated trope affects this park like no other...)

I can walk like a penguin in 3-effin'-D!

As always, click for big and for more drawings from the Aquarium.
I went to the New England Aquarium with my aunt and cousin who were both suffering a mean case of Bermuda withdrawal. The sketches I did pretty much speak for themselves, so do look at them please. We had a fantastic time.
Although I would like to talk about the Simon's IMAX 3-Effin'-D Theatre, since I'd never experienced the fury of a three-effin'-d (it will never stop being funny) IMAX film before.
It was... different.
The film we saw was something called "Under the Sea 3D", in which you look at beautiful footage of the Coral Triangle as Jim Carrey explains what's going on. (This is one of those documentaries that suffers from too much narration. So you start wondering if whomever was in charge of the narration hired Jim Carrey and asked him, early on, "Dude, could you tone it down a little?") It's nice. It also probably would have been just as entertaining as a conventional IMAX movie.
Now, the 3D glasses were comfortable on me, so that wasn't a problem (I've seen enough people complain about this that it felt worth mentioning). And the 3D itself wasn't too much of a distraction either -- not for the first half-hour anyway, but more on that later. It felt, oddly, like looking through a really big window. I'm used to 3D films where the fish and the sea serpents and the seals and all the little squid would appear to be floating out into the theater. Here it looked like all the animals were just about to break the fourth wall, but ultimately did not.
Then my eyes started to adjust to the effects and everything looked foggy and out of focus. It's a good thing this movie was only about forty-five minutes long, but it made me wary of seeing a full-length feature in this format.
For more on this, listen to this Onion AV Club podcast.
It's worth noting that, with me sketching everyone that caught my eye, we managed to see closing time. I have a talent for that.

(Man, it's funny to write about something you did a month ago. Am I up to date? I think I may finally be up to date! Woo! Did you know X-Entertainment has finally picked up the Advent Calender thread?)

HMNH and Lanks

Lank!
Originally uploaded by Babbletrish
Pencil and watercolor. Click the picture to see the larger version.
Just a bit of fun inspired by my archive binge of the wonderful Tetrapod Zoology blog. The Lank is an animal featured in Dougal Dixon's The New Dinosaurs. It a "speculative biology" text (for those who don't read enough sci-fi: yes, that is an actual sci-fi subgenre) that, conceptually, *does* look rather silly today (the similarly-themed Specworld pretty much owns it). But the illustrations are very nice and it's one of the books that got me interested in science fiction illustration back in Middle School.
That said, I haven't read it in a while. As I recall, the Lank is the second most anatomically improbable animal in the book. Your challenge now is to guess what extinct group of animals the Lank is descended from.
I'll give you a hint: look closely at her forelimbs.

Had kind of an interesting visit to the Harvard Museum of Natural History the other day. I went with my cousin, who is an architect. We wound up seeing the entire museum. I never realised the Peabody museum was so huge. MCZ has a very nice temporary exhibit about color in nature, and the glass sea creatures are still on display for another month (I think). Even though we had a whirlwind tour, I was able to do a few quick sketches.
About the only disappointment was this: the second floor of the hall of birds and mammals was closed. No bird studies for me.