Zoo Photos

Went on an excursion to the Perth Zoo the other day, to help out with my mother's school. It was a lovely afternoon, wandering round with a small group of very well-behaved kids, and my mother, my best friend (and relief teacher at the school) and a student teacher. I took my camera, and got some great documentary shots of the kids, but of course I can't show those here, so here are some of my favourite animal shots. I took all of these in the Australian Bushwalk section of the zoo.

A dingo

A grey kangaroo

More kangaroos

A koala

And lastly, my favourite shot, a numbat. It's so rare to see the numbat out and about, and it was right down close to the viewing area, collecting nesting material, so I was able to get a lot of good shots! =)

And for those interested, I was using an Olympus E-PL2 with a 40 – 150mm lens. 

Illustrations: Pirates & Mermaids

Here is the finished set. I'm planning to do more with that little pirate, especially as I'm much more comfortable with this style by now. This little narrative went off in my portfolio, but I've only just got round to posting it.

Click to see it bigger!

Previous posts:

iPad: Pirate

Illustration: Parrot Stealing

Illustration: Parrot Spying

Sneak Peek: Rita Hayworth

I'm currently working on a portraiture commission of Rita Hayworth, a publicity portrait from Tonight and Every Night. I've made good progress on Rita herself, but anticipate her costume taking quite some time – it's almost entirely feathers and sequins, with some sparkly bracelets thrown in for good measure. >.< 

I'm using my usual 0.5 mechanical pencil with a #B lead, and an #8B pencil on 100gsm Quill sketching paper. I don't usually do commissions of stars, but this is for a family acquaintance, so I bend my rules for him. So far I've done around 6 hours work. Half her face still needs a lot of work, but for some reason I always seem to work right to left, when it would make more sense (my being right handed) to work in the opposite direction. You can see the sheet of paper I use to prevent smudging in the photo. 

Illustrations: Flying Carpets

Here are some more graphic illustrations that went into my portfolio as samples of black and white and colour in a bolder style. 

This flying carpet salesman was done a while back, in black and white, inspired by a little man I saw while in Malaysia. I coloured him using adjustment layers up for my promotional postcards, and quite liked the result. 

So when I turned a quick iPad doodle (I'm not quite sure what started me on it, I know I was feeling grumpy because I was having computer problems, and I suppose a supercilious giraffe is a natural progression or something....) into a finished black and white piece in the same style, I coloured that too. 

And here are the originals. The salesman has been in my Educational Publishing portfolio for quite some time. I was sure I'd blogged him, but I must have been mistaken, as I can't find the post anywhere... Originally these were just an extension of my BlackLine Master illustrations, with a bit of shading added to make them suitable for greyscale printing, so they're pretty solidly aimed at the Educational Publishing market. 

All done in Photoshop CS4 with a Wacom Intuos 3.