I think he's adorable. I finished this one early into the project, and not just because he was number 2 on my list. The numbered order of the animals in the project has really no meaning at all, other than for the sake of counting to 100 in the video. A lot of the order was determined at random before they were even drawn, and then by the end a lot of them had been rearranged so that similar animals or similar drawing styles would not appear close to each other on the list. I thought it would be best to start with a cat and dog.
The rabbit originally started out as a couple of redesigns of a character I previously made called Ugly Bunny. A few years ago I wanted to try and start a series of cartoons about a rabbit who lived in a pet shop and was mad because no one would ever take him home, but it wasn't funny enough or interesting enough for me to invest a lot of time into. Eventually I thought that redesigning an older character would just be cheating and put off doing the rabbit. This final design was one of the last animals I drew for the project. It was supposed to be a kind of crazy design, but is actually on the tame side compared to some of the real abstract ones I came up with for other animals.
I absolutely adore pixel art, and spent much of my spare time before college messing around in the simple paint program that comes with all PCs to create pixel art. I made sprites of all of my friends, sprites of alien characters that appear in some of my animations, and lots of other sprites and entire maps of worlds in paint, as there was a brief time where I tried to develop games. I picked out the alligator to do in this style, and it's one of my favorites on this list. Believe me when I say I could have done all 100 of the animals as pixel art, but I wanted this one to be special and unique. A future project, perhaps?
Yes, there are a few of the animals in the bunch that are robotic killing machines, but this one's my favorite. One of my favorites out of all of them, in fact. I had to throw in a few designs that had lots of detail. It would be too easy if they were all so simple. The last thing I want is to have no challenge whatsoever. That being said, if I actually intended to animate this bad boy, I'm sure it would be a big pain. Don't worry though, I'll be torturing myself with equally detailed projects in the coming months as I try to build a better portfolio for myself. You'll see.
While some of the animals are designed as cartoon versions of what you'd expect to see in everyday life, some of them have actual jobs and personalities beyond just being wildlife. Take Mr. Cobra here. His suitcase is full of important documents as he slithers his way across the streets of New York to get to work on time. He is respected by all of his animal co-workers, and has never tried to eat any of them.
I think the possum here should be hanging off of the giant letters of a title screen to some sort of children's cartoon. Maybe I'll make a mock title card and give him some buddies to crawl around the other letters.
Another favorite. I'd really like to try and animate this, because the lack of outlines on it is different from what I usually do. Even though he is mostly black and white, I picture the world around him being displayed in many colors, but all with the same soft, warm feel as the ferret.
Man, was this one hard. After going through several designs that were actually realistic and terrifying, I wasn't satisfied and changed the direction to having a t-rex do something completely ridiculous and impossible. And then once I settled on the idea of having him pilot a plane, rendering took quite a while because I kept messing up the perspective and changing the colors and shading on every part of this. But just look at him! Look at how happy this dinosaur is to be flying.
Just one of a few animals I didn't know existed before starting this project, it's now one of my favorite animals. Go google this thing, it's beautiful, and so tiny. Cliones are also nicknamed sea angels, hence the halo.
I was almost finished with this one when the idea of making it look like a paper cut out dawned on me. Unsure whether or not I wanted to change it so radically, I first tried out the paper texture on the mosquito before making up my mind. Assassin spiders are really nasty looking things and they have quite a bit of hair. The texture used on the spiders body is actually a picture of my cat blown up.
Did you notice there were no outlines? I did the same thing with the panda, but it works better here.
The design I was most hesitant to include, because to some this could come across as lazy, like a stick figure. That's because of the lack of context. Even stick figures can be done well! When I see poodles, I really see just a walking poofball with stick legs, and I find it hard not to draw that way.
This one originally had a body, but it was removed because the head stands strong enough on its own. I feel it can be drawn in only a few strokes and still look good.
This was the first one I did, just as a way of making sure I wanted to take on this project. After completing this with a big smile on face, I sketched up dozens of other ideas. I have this design to thank for the existence of the whole project.
The moa involved a lot of experimentation. I wanted it to be different enough from the ostrich to warrant its inclusion, but I just couldn't get satisfied with the colors. Then I thought I'd just screw around and copy the image onto itself over and over, but to my surprise I actually liked this mess I had created! After cleaning it up a bit I arrived at this final product.
I'm a fan of the sleek and neat gradient-colored designs I gave a lot of animals. I was afraid of overusing the style a lot, but once I decided to do this design for the hercules beetle late into the project, I had to use it once more.
I don't have a lot to say about this one, but I just think it's ridiculous and adorable and I'm really happy with it. I tried to do other animals in this style, but they didn't work out.
This was the very last one to be completed. With a few animals left to choose from this warthog hand puppet took a spot on the list away from a japanese spider crab, a star nosed mole, and a raccoon.
Coming soon: Rejects, alternate versions, and honorable mentions!
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