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about drawing

What I’ve Been Doing

by JR Kinyak on October 27, 2011

in Carnivores,Operations

Roll of tigers in progress

I’ve been wanting to write a post about the animals killed near Zanesville, Ohio, last week, but I’m not sure how to say everything I want to say. I did have the idea, though, to draw a tribute to the 49 unfortunate mammals who died, and I’ve been working on it the past several days, which is one reason why there hasn’t been a Daily Mammal for a while.

Tigers in progress

So far, I’ve drawn 14 of the 18 Bengal tigers, though I have yet to color them. I’m not going to color them as elaborately as I do the Daily Mammals, and you can see that I was a lot more general with my line work, too. After the tigers, I’ll draw the 17 lions. Lions are sexually dimorphic and eight of them were lionesses, so they won’t be as monotonous as the tigers. But drawing the tigers has become a bit of a sacred act, in a way, an act of witness and regret.

Tagged as: about drawing, humans, lions, tigers, zanesville

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Short-eared Brushtail Possum (Trichosurus caninus)

by JR Kinyak on October 5, 2011

in Marsupials,Operations

Short-eared brushtail possum (click image to enlarge)

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I drew this fellow last week, and just now, sitting down to research him, I ended up tumbling about in my books and online, finding not a lot about the possum—he’s a marsupial who lives in a little-bitty sliver of eastern Australia—but several other bits and pieces somewhat related to the species, which is also known as the bobuck.

For instance, as a spiritual totem, the short-eared brushtail possum could be associated with “mushroom and fungi energy” and both “broadcasting yourself” and “retreating into dark places.” (I don’t mean to sound overly snarky. I’m not into totem animals…at all…well, I don’t know, maybe I am, not in terms of religion or spirituality or trances or deep oneness of the soul, but in terms of affinities and identification, I could get into it. I relate to tree kangaroos and sloths. But I don’t go for the new-agey part of it. Anyway, the woman who runs the above-linked site says she noticed a glut of information about wolves as spirit animals and a lack of attention to marsupial moles, and I love that.) Isn’t the illustration of the possum at that link gorgeous? I quite like it.

Also, I learned that there’s a taxonomic quandary of some kind around this possum. You can read a bit about it at the Australian Museum’s website, but I’m not going to get sucked in. Basically, I just blindly draw the mammals listed in the Smithsonian’s Mammal Species of the World, and that’s that.

Speaking of that list, finding the link to it just now has alerted me that the website has been updated and now has a searchable database. I’ve been working off the spreadsheet they used to have available for download. Now I’ll have to decide whether or not to merge my old list with the new. You think that you can just say, “I know what would be neat—I’m going to draw all the mammals in the world!” But it turns out to be much more complicated than that.

Finally, I picked this possum out of my copy of Furred Animals of Australia, published in the United States in 1947, a book that I’ve referred to often in the past but haven’t thought much about. This time, I decided to Google the author, Ellis Troughton, wondering if he might be a naturalist of the adventurous, tall-tale variety. I don’t think he is, necessarily, but I did learn that he served in World War I in France from 1916 to 1919, and that during World War II he investigated scrub typhus in New Guinea. (I’m not entirely sure what the implications of that fact are.) He was the Australian Mammal Society’s first Honorary Life Member. (Is that a society of mammals? Aren’t they all?) And most perplexing of all, I found a solitary reference, in an interview with a physiologist conducted by the Australian Academy of Science, to Ellis Troughton being nicknamed “Naughty Troughty,” which I guess might rhyme in Australia. Why was he called that? I have no idea. I wish I did, though.

These bits of information inspired me to go through the introductory and…stuff-at-the-end material of Furred Animals of Australia in a quest for more about Mr. Troughton. (What is the word for stuff in the front and back of a book that isn’t the main part of the book? I can’t think of it.) I found, in the back, “Collecting Hints,” in which Mr. Troughton tells us how to preserve the small animals that we may injure in clearing timber or that our cat might bring in. He advises that “every effort should be made to preserve any small mammals accidentally killed about homesteads…The presentation of such specimens to the local museums represents a very material contribution to the knowledge of our unique Australian fauna of mammals.” Even if you’re not in Australia, something to consider, yes?

In the front of the book, Mr. Troughton reprints “A Creed for Nature Lovers” from a 1936 issue of The Australian Museum Magazine, and it’s lovely. It includes “I believe: That we should not harm living things that are harmless to us, as we hope to avoid harmful things ourselves; that even harmful creatures should be controlled with due regard for their zoological heritage and right to survive.” Words to live by, and something I wish I could get my kids to understand when they want to smash every spider that gets into the house.

Speaking of children, in his introduction to the book, Mr. Troughton says:

“Pleading protection’s cause in museum lectures for school children, I have reminded them of Barrie’s Peter Pan, and his friendly fairy kept alive only by the children’s belief in such quaint things. These children will be the grown-ups of to-morrow and both young and old must put their united influence behind any sound movement for the protection of wild life…

“Only by such universal belief in their right to existence can we ensure the survival of most of the fascinating creatures for the delight and instruction of future generations; so that, in the spirit of Kipling’s beautiful ‘L’Envoi’:

Each for the joy of the working,
And each in his separate star,
Shall draw the thing as he sees it,
For the God of things as they are.”

Thanks for joining me while I draw the mammals as I see them.

Tagged as: about drawing, books, possum

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Coyote (Canis latrans)

by JR Kinyak on September 21, 2011

in Carnivores

Coyote (click image to enlarge)

Here’s an idea! Why don’t I point you to two embarrassingly bad old drawings in a row? I drew the coyote as mammal number 65, way back in 2007 (oh God, it’s been four years and I have barely a year’s worth of mammals…). Look how my drawing style has changed: very much for the better, yes? Looking over that post is bittersweet because the drawing was by request of Maleta Scrivner, a lifelong family friend who has since died. I wish I could have drawn her a better coyote back then, but heck, I think she liked just about anything I drew, or at least that’s what she let me think!

In homeschool this year, we read a book that my dad bought for me when I was 8, Coyote & by Joe Hayes. It’s a collection of Native American coyote trickster stories, and I think we’d all highly recommend it. One thing we learned was that if you want to make Coyote laugh, call him by the secret name that always gets him tickled: Yellow-Behind-the-Ears.

Here’s Coco’s drawing of the old trickster.

Coyote by Coco, age 12

Tagged as: about drawing, coco, dog, people, repeat

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Five Random Rodents

by JR Kinyak on April 8, 2011

in Operations,Rodents

Five random rodents (click image to enlarge)


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Rodents keep me up at night. I can hear them scritch-scritch-scritching in the attic and the walls. Their whiskers lightly tickle my skin and their buck teeth gnaw on my bones. Their beady little eyes stare at me from every corner, glinting in the dark. Not because my house is infested—it isn’t—but because of the Daily Mammal Rodent Problem.

Of the 5,000-ish mammal species in the world, 40 percent are rodents: small, toothy, bewhiskered, scurrying, and so nauseatingly beige. Tan. Grayish-brown. Buffy to tawny ochraceous with white underparts, if you want to get technical. In my database (the Smithsonian’s Mammal Species of the World), there are 2,278 ratty little pipsqueak rodents.

So there are thousands of them, but so what? Mammals are mammals, right? Right, but there are no photographs of many of these rodents. None! And they are boring. I would guess that 80 percent of them look alike. In fact, one family of rodents, Muridae, accounts for one sixth of all mammals in the world. Well, depending on how you count and whether you consider Cricetidae part of Muridae or its own family. I think. No rodent has ever been called charismatic megafauna, not even the largest rodent, the capybara, which I drew years ago.

They just aren’t fun to draw, which I could get past if they were at least easy to draw, but the lack of reference images makes it so frustrating. I have to find related species that people have taken photos of and then find descriptions of the species I’m actually drawing—see the above “buffy to tawny ochraceous with white underparts”—and sort of improvise. And I know that I take some liberties in my drawing, I mean, my work is not hyper-realistic and it’s not going down as the definitive record of what any given species looks like, but I still want to be accurate in my own way, and I have wicked perfectionist tendencies that make me uncomfortable when I feel like I’m falsifying anything.

So I’ve been putting the rodents off. My idea of drawing multiple rodents in one go has helped, but if I happen to pick one that appears to be short on reference, I’ll usually skip it, telling myself that maybe someone will take pictures of it in the next few years. I have been trying to draw rodents. I’ve drawn 108 rodents out of 380 mammals total, which means that 28 percent of my drawings have been rodents. It’s not 40 percent, but it’s not too bad. But I am still terrified that if I see this project through, I’ll be drawing nothing but anonymous beige furballs for the last decade.

This all brings me to my new idea, which is: Random Rodents! I went to random.org, which generates random numbers, and told it to pick five numbers between 104 and 2278, which were the numbers of the undrawn rodents in my database when sorted by…whatever, you get it, yes? It picked 1789, 1873, 903, 1565, and 980, I researched the rodents associated with those numbers, and here they are!

Notice that we got lucky with the porcupine; the other five, although varying from 7 centimeters to 20 centimeters in length, look like quadruplets. Sure, some of them have long tails and some have slightly shorter tails, and some are ochraceous to tawny while others are tawny to ochraceous, but all in all, I could probably just spend a week drawing generic beige mouse-like critters and no one would know the difference.

The porcupine is Hystrix cristata, a North African crested porcupine. The others, top to bottom and left to right, are Leopoldamys sabanus, the long-tailed giant rat; Pelomys campanae, the bell groove-toothed swamp rat; Punomys lemminus, the puna mouse; and Reithrodontomys paradoxus, the Nicaraguan harvest mouse. I’ll try to do a Random Rodents drawing once a week and together, we’ll force our way through this rat’s nest.

Tagged as: about drawing, mouse, multiple, porcupine, random, rat

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Hibernators Week: Chipmunks Six Ways (Tamias spp.)

by JR Kinyak on February 7, 2009

in Rodents,Theme Weeks

click image to enlarge

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In one sense, I got lazy with this drawing, doing it in sharpie on top of my pencil with no shading, no blending, no colored pencil, and it’s on my tracing paper sketch instead of a nice crisp sheet of vellum. No furry details, no crazy colors. But if you knew how long I researched it and how many times I tried to draw it the normal way, you would know it wasn’t lazy at all. So here are six species of chipmunks from the Tamias genus. Clockwise from the top right: T. obscurus, T. quadrimaculatus, T. speciosus, T. senex, T. amoenus, and T. alpinus. All six species live in California.

Six more rodents! Check ‘em off if you’re scoring at home!

Tagged as: about drawing, chipmunk, hibernation

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Rats Three Ways (Rattus lutreolus, Rattus fuscipes, Oryzomys palustris)

by JR Kinyak on January 13, 2009

in Rodents

click image to enlarge
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It’s always nice to knock off multiple rodents in one drawing. You have no idea how much the rodents gnaw at me. Forty percent of all mammals are rodents. Forty percent. As I’ve mentioned before, I did not consider that fact when I first thought, “I know! I’ll draw all the mammal species!” In order not to spend the last few years of this project drawing nothing but rodents, I should probably draw them three days a week. Would that bore you?

This particular drawing is one of those good exercises in perfectionism prevention for me. Sometimes I’m not at all happy with my work. But then I remember that there are 5,000 species, so I’m bound to dislike at least 500 of my drawings. Weird!

Shown here, clockwise from lower left, are:

Swamp Rat (Rattus lutreolus), who lives in Australia. This rat is notable, according to its species account in Mammalian Species, because “under experimental conditions, R. lutreolus was able to tolerate long periods of water deprivation. Intake of solid food and urine output declined during this period…The ecological significance of its extraordinary tolerance for water imbalance requires study.” Also, it has the shortest tail of all the rats in Australia. And other than the Tasmanian subspecies, it likes to live in wetlands.

Bush Rat (Rattus fuscipes), another Australian. Did you know there are Australian Alps? I didn’t, until I read that “although mainly a lowland species, R. fuscipes occurs in Australian Alps to 2,210 m.” in Mammalian Species. I could go on to tell you about what Mammalian Species describes as “a serendipitous discovery relating to dietary intake of fluoroacetate by R. fuscipes of Western Australia,” but I won’t. This particular species account is rather long, but in browsing through it, I see that “During major fires, R. fuscipes retreats into burrows; afterward it hides in deep accumulations of ash.”

Marsh Rice Rat (Oryzomys palustris), of the eastern United States, from southeastern Pennsylvania to the Florida Keys and as far west as Illinois. This rat is semi-aquatic, and like the swamp rat, it lives in wetlands. In several states, marsh rice rats are the main sustenance of barn owls, and they’re also preyed on by other owls, cottonmouths, water snakes, hawks, raccoons, foxes, mink, weasels, and skunks.

Tagged as: about drawing, rat

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Przewalski’s Horse (Equus przewalskii) and a vacation

by JR Kinyak on September 3, 2008

in Ungulates

click image to enlarge


These tough little fellows from the Mongolian steppes are the only living example we have of a truly wild horse. (Other wild horses, such as the mustangs around these parts, are descended from domestic horses, and therefore not “truly” wild.) Unfortunately, Przewalski’s horse is extinct in the wild. In fact, we nearly lost the species altogether. In 1977, we were down to 300 of them. At that point, a group called the Foundation for the Preservation and Protection of the Przewalski Horse was created with the goal of organizing breeding programs between zoos and eventually reintroducing the Przewalski’s horse into the wild. Today, there are some 1,400 of the sturdy guys, and some of them are enjoying a semi-wild life in one of Mongolia’s national parks.

The reason I chose the Przewalski’s for today, other than the fact that I’ve had a fondness for the species since I was a horse-crazy little girl, is that tomorrow morning, I’ll be leaving on a trip to Switzerland and then to France, where I’ll be visiting some prehistoric cave paintings. Animals of various kinds were frequent subjects for the artists who created the mysterious and enduring paintings. Painted horses gallop through some of the caves, such as Lascaux and Chauvet, and although no one is sure whether they are the same species as Przewalski’s horse, they certainly look like they could be. See for yourself in these photographs of Chauvet from The Bradshaw Foundation. The Daily Mammal will return the week of September 15.

Consecutive days of mammals: 1
Record: 16

Tagged as: about drawing, endangered, horse

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