Elephant Sketches

I went elephant sketching over the holidays. What fun to observe these amazing animals! Here are a couple studies done with red pencil, markers, and a "comic brush" pen. Elephants are the stars of my next comic book, so I want to get to know real elephants before I try to caricature them.

Civet Cat

Just playing around with line, color and shapes. This civet is having a rest on a low-hanging vine.

Cartoony-er

I'm working on a few new pages to thicken my comic book so it'll stand out on the shelves better after we print the next round. This picture is more cartoony than the rest of the book, but I kinda like it...

Kitty on the Outskirts

Another development drawing for the next comic book. Here Kitty is admiring the distant lights of Bangkok.

Mahout

Playing with the look of the next comic book, about elephants in the city of Bangkok.

"Gibbons" in Print

It's in print! The Wildlife Friends of Thailand and I have finally printed our comic book with the help of the International Primate Protection League (IPPL).. The first run was a fairly small number of books in English with more books in Thai coming next week. Most of the Thai-language books will be distributed to local schools for free so that kids can learn about the lives of gibbons that are stolen from the wild and kept as pets. My English-speaking friends will have to fight over the English-language books that remain after the IPPL receive theirs. At the moment we don't have plans to distribute the books online or in the book stores, but I'll keep you posted if that changes. I'd like to at least get a downloadable version of it up at some point.

Finally! My first comic book.

Zombie Ant Fungus!

I'm a big fan of science journalist Carl Zimmer. I get ideas for drawings and comics every time he posts on his blog, The Loom. Last week he blogged about a fungus which turns an ant into a zombie that marches 25 cm up a plant, turns to the northwest, and bites a leaf vein. Then the fungus grows a stalk that shoots out of the poor little ant's head and produces spores that rain down on the jungle floor below, to infect more ants. What an evil little fungus.

Here's a quick drawing based on the story.