Saturday, March 10, 2012

Personal Trade with AinsleeG

A relative newcomer to ATCs for all, I was quite taken my Ainslee's art and her love of obscure animals and thus proposed a trade. I illustrated two of her original characters, and a favourite pokemon of the both of us. Here they are:


Saule the goblin. She drew my goblin, Hemlock in exchange. And although our goblins look very different from one another, this seemed like an appropriate exchange. I am not 100% happy with this rendition, and will happily do it again if I messed up the colours, which I suspect I may have....



Herman the saiga. Now, Herman is a personal character of Ainslee's that I suspect she created in order to parody the common tradition of "sparkle pets". Thus she chose a rather unusual and rather less than handsome beastie and applied to him all the sparkle pet adornemts - multiple piercings and a combination of hippy/goth clothing and colours. You cannot see his leggings in this illustration, of course. I chose to use my "no outlines" style for this, to see if I could make him look vaguely realistic. And I am quite proud of the results.

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The third request was for a pokemon, Mightyena. Now, Ainslee and I are both in agreement that Mightyena is based on a hyena and thus I decided not to focus on the vicious nature of this dark pokemon, but instead on her mothering skills. For it is a little known fact that hyenas are very good mothers. They need to be, spotted hyena cubs have nasty fangs from birth and attempt to engage in siblicide from the time they open their eyes. And brown hyenas, which one might argue this pokemon more closely resembles, will look after another's cubs, even raising them if the mother dies.

So, here a proud Mightyena mother gazes off into the distance whilst her poochyena cub has spotted that someone is drawing them and is curious to investigate.

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