Penguin, James Penguin

A sketch inspired by one of my favorite Christmas songs, "Penguin, James Penguin" by #bradpaisley.

This is from the part where the lyrics say "Then a knight in shining polyester waddled through his door."

Random Nonsense

My daughter had a friend over, and they decided to do some drawings. Her friend asked me how to draw penguins, and this came out. I felt like drawing a walrus, but I know, from researching for my Lunch Note Project, that penguins don't live where walruses (walrusi?) do. So I decided to make my penguins very, very lost.

Also, I realized that people always draw walruses sitting on ice. I figured it was about time one of them questioned the wisdom of it, as opposed to sitting on, say, a couch.

This one also ran away with me...

...but in a less obvious way.

This was supposed to be another straight-forward watercolor illustration. Then, when I was almost done, it seems like I needed to add a bit of blue to the skin tones. So I put brush to paper and... it turned the color a flat, dark gray.

I'll have to remember that color combination if I ever am called on to do a drawing of zombies, but not what I had in mind for the alphabet book. I hit the painting with a lot of water, hoping to lift off the color, which resulted in a flat, light gray.

So I had no choice but to reach for the acrylics.

I ended up really liking it. I've been wanting to put more color in the figure, but I didn't want to muddy it too much. If I paint with acrylic, though, I can put in all the color I want. I'll still probably stick with watercolor for the bulk of the pictures, but use acrylics for the features.

Regarding the alphabet book itself, this is one of the few pages where the image has something in it that starts with the actual letter. I had originally planned to have P stand for penguin, but it seems like penguins are everywhere in kids' literature. I opted for the platypus instead.