Almost done with ABC Animals!

If you remember, in Part 4 we left off with the letter “S” and “Sea Horse” in progress.So “Sea Horse” is finally finished. That only left me with the letters T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z. I have to admit I was starting to get “artist’s block” the closer I got to the end of the alphabet. It was kind of like the end of “Inktober”, actually. But, determined to finish, I have now gotten up to the letter “Y”. (Looks like “Z” will have to be a post all to itself.)Toucan was a pretty logical choice for “T”. They come in all kinds of color combinations, (and the one you see here might not even be one of them). Whimsical comes in real handy at times like this.Who would have thought that the letter “U” would be represented by the lowly uromastyx? I wouldn’t have, because I had never heard of one until I Googled “Animals that start with U”!

I thought this vicuña was super cute, and he didn’t really look that hard… Suffice it to say I did not take photos of my first few attempts. Finally I edited the photo on my phone and added a rough grid to it. That really helped; whether it’s “cheating” or not, I haven’t yet decided.If you look closely, you will see that I couldn’t really get my grid lines erased properly. But by this point I just wanted to finish the alphabet. Grid line erasing can be done later.The walrus is probably my favorite one out of this post. And I am NOT making this up! The Xoloitzcuintli is a real dog from Mexico. You can look them up if you want. I resorted to the grid method for this little guy, as you can see below.

He wasn’t quite as hard as the vicuña so I didn’t need as many squares for the grid. I really like the editing feature that allows you to draw or write over the top of photos or screen shots on the iPhone.The logical choice for “Y” was “yak”, since that’s the only animal I could think of that started with that letter. I found this photo on Pinterest, and you cannot imagine how “non-yak-like” my attempt at this was. I erased the whole thing and went back to Google: “Animals that start with “Y”… All I found was “yellow-this” and “yellow-that”, which I didn’t really think was fair, since “yellow” is technically not part of the animals actual name. So I decided to go for “Birds that start with Y”. Sure enough, everything started with “yellow”, so I settled on the “yellow-billed kingfisher”.

I couldn’t get that spiky look he has on his head feathers, so I decided to go whimsical on this one, and came up with the following:“Y” stands for “Yay!” Only one letter to go! Not bad, I guess, considering I started this project in March of this year. But I only have another month to go before I’ll have to say “March of last year…”