Weekly Art Practice - Week 16
This week I went for hyenas. They’ve always been pretty cool and feel like another “weird dog” type. But surprise surprise, I actually learned a lot about hyenas this week. First one being, they aren’t that closely related to dogs. Instead they are closer to the cat family but their closest animal relative is actually the meerkat.
Day 1 - Drawing from imagination
I was very over confident on day 1. It disappeared as soon as I started sketching. Very much a ‘head empty’ kind of day where I feel like I did just draw some weird dogs. Can’t even say these are recognizably hyenas.
Day 2 - Figure sketching
A little better with references. But already I’m feeling like this animal is a challenge. Its shapes are un-intuitive to me.
Day 3 - Reference studies
Now we’re starting to get somewhere.
Day 4 - Style studies
One of my goals with hyenas was to avoid having only Lion King art for reference. Which actually didn’t turn out to be that hard. People love to draw hyenas, possibly because their faces are so expressive.
Reference: The Gnoll Train on Tumblr
Reference: By FrozenSpoots on Twitter
Day 5 - Drawing from imagination
My girlfriend says the large face here brings furry energy, which probably isn’t wrong.
Conclusion
The fun facts about hyena’s I learned came from this anatomy study by BitterSweetDisease on Deviantart. However I’m not the first person to go searching for their account. I found a forum of someone else trying to find their original stuff saying the account has been deactivated. Which is unfortunate because the pieces that have made it to Pinterest are well done.