Quokka

Hello everyone!
I have recently been invited to join this wonderful blog, which I am really proud of. As this is my first post, I will say a few words about myself. My name is Anna, I am an illustrator and an artist. Originally I am from Russia but four years ago I moved to Australia, which became my home. I hope you will forgive me making mistakes, as I am not a native speaker of English.
As an artist I love to be experimental with styles and techniques. I love abstract art and cartooning as well as drawing from life and my materials range from charcoal to color pencils, from watercolors to digital painting. You can see examples of my art on my website.
One of the greatest sources of inspiration for me is animal life and marine creatures.
In my free time I volunteer at my city's zoo, and almost all holidays I spend snorkeling, diving and drawing sea dwellers.
Today I would like to present my drawing of a Quokka, small and very cute Australian marsupial. It has a baby in a pouch, that's why it is a bit lopsided.

I made a rough sketch of it in the zoo yesterday and finished it off at home.

If you are interested in my process, here are major steps of my drawing:

1. I  made a rough sketch with my pocket brush pen, but any pencil will do. Probably it is better to measure and sketch proportions and general shape of the animal, but I do it in a wrong way - I start with the eye or the ear and gradually draw from the small to the whole...
Here the sketch is at the beginning stage, only head is roughly drawn.

2. This is how the sketch look like after it is finished, I put some details on the head of the animal, but it is optional at this stage.

3. Here I started to draw the fur of the animal on top of my sketch. Yes, I know that this is wrong. Yes, I still do it ;-)
When I draw from the photo reference, I often skip sketch stage and draw straight with my fine liner, as this technique gives a big room for correction. But when you draw from live animal, you do not have time to draw accurately as it moves, so sketch becomes the guide for the further drawing. I draw fur with Staedtler Pigment Liner size 0.05, this is my favorite tool for this purpose, so far.

4. I am not so fond of exact realism and as I found that some artistic assumption and invention makes drawings more visually interesting.
Here is how the animal looked like when I finished hatching.

 5. This is another optional stage - I put tone on the drawing with ink wash. Normally I do not do it with this kind of drawing, but here I experimented and it worked well...

6. The final stage - coloring with Prismacolor Premier Pencils. As I taught myself to work with this kind of media and never studied it from professional teacher, I just follow the simple rule - I draw what I see. If  I see the blue or green color on animal's fur - I just draw it  without much thinking why I see it there and if it is possible or not. It always works for me.

Thank you everyone for the attention:-)

Anna
www.annatelman.com