David Petersen's Blog: The Bearded Puemel

Last Friday on my Twitch Stream, we did the eighth 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 Bearded Puemel. And below are my steps to create it as well as the community submissions.

We started with the prompts of my original 2000's era linocut print titled 'Extinct' as well as a Camel, a Puma, & a Goat.

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 drawing with mechanical pencil on a sheet of copy paper to try and reimagine the beast. I knew I wanted to keep it low to the ground so I started with the posture of a reclined camel, but then decided to go with puma legs instead, thinking the humps and face were communicating camel enough. I scanned it and did come digital manipulation to it in Photoshop to make the neck longer and upscale the head. I added a little tone to the overall silhouette to make sure it read as a shape the way I wanted.

After I was happy enough with my above design, I printed that piece out on copy paper 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 Bearded Puemel. I used a Copic Multiliner 0.7 SP pen to ink the art. I was still streaming this portion on Twitch, though as my end of stream time was coming up, I knew I wasn't going to finish, so after I said goodbye to everyone watching and offered encouragement as they worked on their pieces over the weekend, I finished inking the humps off stream.

Once Julia and I had some dinner, I scanned the artwork into Photoshop to prep it for final color. First thing was to drop it into the template I have for #DrawTheExtinct pieces with the border & background already established. Then I started drawing in flat colors. This part of coloring (called flatting) is just a professional digital version of coloring-in-the-lines to establish the color areas.

These initial color choices were partly based on the blue-grey tones of the lino cut and I thought I'd use the goats tones for this fantastic beast. I added a color hold to the pupil of the ye so that I could play with it's color as well as to be able to render a highlight on it in the next step.

Below you can again see the final rendered colors (where I brought in more warmth and a transition shift from the puma legs to the goat/camel head) with a border and type applied in this final version.

But, as this is a community event, I wanted to share all the other entries posted in the Discord. 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!)