David Petersen's Blog: The Winged Hamhog

Last Friday on my Twitch Stream, we did the second community draw-along event #DrawTheExtinct where I posted an image from an old block print I made with a few animal photo inspiration prompts and the idea to create an imaginary extinct animal. I worked on my piece live on my Twitch stream while viewers worked at home and then on Monday we shared our finished pieces.

Here is my finished Winged Hamhog. And below are my steps to create it as well as the community submissions.

We started with the prompts of my original linocut print from a piece titled 'Extinct' as well as a hamster, a wild hog or boar, and a bat. I named the creature 'The Winged Hamhog'. I told the viewers that they could use any combination of the inspiration prompts––they could make their version as cute and cuddly as a pocket pet stray kitten, as monstrous and deadly as a giant kaiju destroying cities, or anything in between. I also wanted this to be an excuse to get their pencils moving. I invited all skill levels, because I'm a firm believer that you shouldn't have to be good at something or pursuing mastery of it to just simply enjoy the act of it...and art is no exception.

On the Friday stream I started with mechanical pencil on a sheet of copy paper. The image here is after I'd scanned my pencils, resized the image, and made some adjustments to some of the anatomy in Photoshop.

I started with the spade shape of the hog nose and decided that his overall body shape should echo that...which also is respectful of the original linoleum block print design.

With the pencils scanned and adjusted, I printed out the image and taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. Using a lightpad, I was able to see through the surface of the bristol as I inked the Hamhog. I used a Copic Multiliner 0.7 SP pen to ink the art.

Most of the inking was pretty straight forward other than the texture on the wings. I'd penciled a sample of the inking technique, but when I inked it that way, I found it needed more tone and hatching to look right.

On the first #DrawTheExtint stream, I stopped at the finished inks, but I'd gotten more done in the time allotment on this one, so I scanned the inks and proceeded to the color flats.

The color selections were pretty straight forward, it was jsut a matter of using different layers to establish where those color areas started and stopped: The main fur vs the belly fur, the wing structure vs the wing flaps etc.

Below you can again see the final rendered colors with a border and type applied.

But, as this is a community event, I wanted to share all the other entries posted in the Discord (some are works-in-progress I've been told). I awarded a prize and we voted together on a few more (prize winners marked with *) on Monday's Twitch stream and we all enjoyed seeing what each other had done. I hope we get even more participants next month (first Friday!)