This week’s illustration for the Animal Alphabets art challenge was a Zalmoxes. I started out with the intention to make this a smooth skinned dinosaur, but after testing out some feathers I quickly got carried away with feather arrangements. Since I haven’t drawn many feathers during this round, it’s probably a good thing that I gave it a try for this last animal of the alphabet. Next week I’ll post the completed set of illustrations to the blog with some thoughts about the challenge.

This week’s illustration for the Animal Alphabets art challenge was a Tyrannosaurus Rex. This animal looked better with orange skin in my opinion, but I decided to go with blue because I had just drawn an orange tiger last week.

This week’s illustration for the Animal Alphabets art challenge was a Nigersaurus. I spent most of my time on this one trying out various compositions. Fitting this long animal into a square frame turned out to be more challenging than I expected.

Here is an illustration of a Lambeosaurus for this week’s Animal Alphabets art challenge. Early on I went for an orange color for this dino, but I noticed that I’ve already drawn three in this series using that color. Using a correction layer I changed the hue to something a bit more purple since I hadn’t used that color yet. I haven’t used the blue part of the color wheel much in this series so far so I really need to make an effort to go there more often in future illustrations if possible.

This week’s illustration for the Animal Alphabets art challenge was an Kryptops. I haven’t given much emotion to the animals I’ve been drawing so far so I thought I’d throw in a bit of stomping & screaming in this one.

This week’s illustration for the Animal Alphabets art challenge was an Einiosaurus. Sometimes when I’m drawing I’ll do a quick experiment to change the shading layer to a different color just to see what it looks like. Most of the time it looks terrible, but this drawing was the rare exception where it looked kind of interesting so I ended up re-engineering the lighting for the whole drawing.

This is an Alvarezsaurus, a dinosaur that lived approximately 86 – 83 million years ago. I illustrated this animal because I’ve decided to take up the Animal Alphabets art challenge again. A refresher of how this art challenge works: The people who run the official Animal Alphabets twitter account name a specific animal to draw each week, and the artists post their completed work on Mondays at 19:30 GMT. The animals name corresponds to each letter of the alphabet, so at the end of the exercise I should have 26 animals to show.

The sub-theme for this round of Animal Alphabets is extinct animals. One of the challenges of the endangered animals series was gathering enough photo reference material to get the details correct. I’m betting there will be little to no photo references for these animals, and I can’t quite decide if that’s going to be a good thing or a bad thing yet. In the case of the Alvarezsaurus it was quite a freeing feeling to not have photo reference I must say.