New year, new photography paradigm

Happy 2012! Let's hope the world doesn't actually end. In the meantime, I'll be making creturs and taking pictures of them.

I recently went to my favorite local art store and bought a bunch of colored Canson paper, to replace the battered old warm grey piece I've been using for over a year and has withstood many a sudden gust of photobombing wind. Now that piece can retire in piece and pursue its dreams of seeing Aruba or whatever. Godspeed, warm grey Canson. We had good times together.

Anyway, here's what things are going to look like now, as illustrated by three custom cretur orders:

Tamandua (Tamandua tetradactyla)

Meerkat (Suricata suricata)

Honduran white bat (Ectophylla alba), but pink

Malayan Tapir

A long time ago, a good friend commissioned me to needle felt a Malayan tapir (Tapirus indicus), the largest of the four species of tapir (and, like all of them, endangered).

The kicker: I had to do its baby, too. Which in this case ended up being the smallest cretur I've ever made, at only an inch tall and balancing on two legs. It was quite a challenge, and I learned many things from it, one of them being that claws made of Sculpey not only look better, but they also make it easier for the cretur to stand. With such a precariously balanced pose, it was an important discovery to make!

More pictures after the cut:

Bats- group photo

Oh my god, look at all these bats!

Today's stars are the Mexican Freetail and the Little Brown Bat, both of whom I've made before, but you'd hardly be able to tell considering how different all my creturs are from each other. What can I say, consistency is dull.

Mr. Freetail

Mr. Brown

A raccoon and some tapir sketches

Even though I finished this guy a couple of weeks ago, I hadn't posted it because it was commissioned as a SECRET CHRISTMAS PRESENT and the recipient probably reads my blog on occasion. I'm pretty sure it has been delivered by now, so no surprises will be spoiled!

Procyon lotor

There are and will be more secret Christmas presents, but one has not arrived to its destination yet and two more are actually for Orthodox Christmas (Jan 7), so they will not be posted until after that date in order to not spoil anything for anyone. I really hate spoilers.

More raccoon photos and some HOT EXCLUSIVE TAPIR PLANNING:

Cretur Fetur's first invertebrate

Well, it was about time! After a million mammals and a couple of birds and amphibians, I've finally stepped into the world of arthropods. My inaugural invertebrate is a male Forficula auricularia, an earwig.

Fig. 1: F. auricularia

More pictures under "Read more":

A lot o' lotls

Yeah I'm gonna run that joke into the ground.

So, remember the axolotls-in-progress that I posted a while ago? I have finally finished them all! There are still many more to come but there's a big chance that it will get kind of repetitive after a while, so I'm just going to make this last exciting axolotl post full of color and variety, and keep subsequent axolotls to myself and my Flickr page.

Here are three varieties of axolotl:

Golden albino, melanoid, and leucistic.

These all exist, and in fact there's several more different colors of axolotl. Here is an excellent resource if you want to learn more about it.

wheeee

More pictures under the "read more":

A pig and a yeener

Today is an important day, because today I say goodbye to the very first thing I ever needlefelted. It's the littlest hyena, and he's going to someone who will probably appreciate him even more than I, so hooray little yeen!

Here is the companion watercolor:

And last night I finished a custom spherepig live on the internet! Thanks to everyone who accompanied me on my first livestream and watched me finish this guy:

HELLPIG

I will definitely do more livestreaming in the future, possibly in a couple of weeks. I'll be sure to let you know in advance.

What I'm working on right now

Well, I think it's gonna be a long long time til I make creturs of my own design. Commissions got me buried; am I sad? Oh, no, no no! It's a challenge, man! Got a plan: finish all these orders, then make more!

Anyway here's the very beginning of the holiday rush of custom cretur orders, and the reason why there will be no fetured creturs (and also no more commissions) until like March when I finally defeat the monster of a million orders.

Three axolotls in progress! Everybody loves a 'lotl.

And while this was happening, hyenas and pigs were also getting claimed! So here is the beginning of a hyena watercolor, which I just started about an hour ago:

It's gonna be badass because anything with hyenas in it is badass.

Bye, second axolotl!

So, based on my previous axolotl, I thought this would take me 3-5 days, and it did, but they were awfully hectic. No one should allow me to make time estimates ever again.

I did some improvements on the design, as usual, and I am so freaking happy with this little salamander that for the first time ever I'm actually a little sad to let him go.

Ambystoma mexicanum

Here's the watercolor card that goes with it:

S is for September and Spherepig

Spherepigs! They are great! It is their month!

What does this mean? It means you can get your very own one-of-a-kind spherepig, that you can design yourself!

These are pigs I've made before:

You can design your own custom pig by going to my Etsy shop, clicking on the Custom Spherepig item, and choosing from the following options to build your pig:

Color - Midnight blue, turquoise, bright aqua, neon green, forest green, yellow, amber, apricot, bright orange, baby pink, neon pink, strawberry red, bright red, dark red, plum purple, chestnut, chocolate brown, black, silver gray.

Size - Anywhere between an inch and a half and 3 inches in circumference.

Eyes - Large or small, solid color or over white, whatever color you like from the ones listed above, whatever distance from each other.

Extras - Legs, wings, a tail, a mohawk, a curl of hair, whatever you can think of!

Here are some examples that I just drew, of what your pig could look like:

Mexican free-tailed bat. Yes, again! And goodbye to it!

Like the second hoatzin, this Bat II was commissioned and thus was fated to fly away as soon as the final needle stab fell upon its fuzzy abdomen.  Like the first hoatzin, I still had the first bat, because its owner has not yet picked it up.

Also like the second hoatzin, I improved upon the second bat a little:

More pictures under the fold.

A little mouse

Here is a little mouse that I made as part of a collaboration. A friend of mine will receive it soon, and make a chainmail armor for it. And then we will have a mouse with chainmail armor!

More pictures after the cut.

Bye, second hoatzin!

Three days ago, a hoatzin was commissioned by someone who expressed a lot of enthusiasm for good ol' Opisthocomus hoazin. So I, equally enthusiastic, made Hoatzin 2.0 for her:

More photos:

Bye, painted dog! Have a good time down under!

The painted dog was finished this very morning, and sent to Australia immediately after. The post office guy tells me it will be there in 6-10 days, which assuages my fear that it wouldn't get there before the 20th, to be auctioned by Painted Dog Conservation on the 23rd. (go there, it's in Perth, do it)

I hope you sell for a MILLION AUSTRALIAN DOLLARS

Lots more pictures under the cut:

African Wild Dog / Painted Dog (Lycaon pictus)

I've got a ton of custom orders this month, somehow. The first and most important is being donated to an organization dedicated to the conservation of Lycaon pictus, the painted dog of Africa, which happens to be my second-favorite African carnivore right after the spotted hyena. Painted Dog Conservation Inc. is holding a fundraiser on April 23 at the Memorial Hall Exhibition Center in Perth, WA, Australia (click here for the Facebook event). If you're anywhere around Perth, I really suggest you go. I was invited by a good friend who is donating a couple of pieces herself, and she makes animal paintings that are worth a plane ticket to Perth to see. If you can't make it, though, I hope you'll consider helping the organization out all the same.

Here is a video about the trade of painted dogs, which considering that there are only about 3,000 of them left in the wild is a huge issue. This is something I wasn't aware of until fairly recently. I want to help out this organization further, so for the month of April, 20% of all my sales will be donated to Painted Dog Conservation.


Um. All I have to show in the way of pictures right now is what I have of the dog so far, which if all goes according to plan will be complete and in Australia within the next three weeks: