The Cow Orchestra!

Here's the final piece I did for the Doodle U theme 'animals playing instruments' :

Hopefully it enlarges when you click on it so you can really see it. 

Can you spot all 33 instruments? (in addition to the conductor)

This took forever, but it was pretty fun researching/trying to draw each of the instruments. Contrabassoons are difficult to draw by the way. I looked up what instruments are typically in an orchestra and how they are arranged. This would be a more modern day orchestra; I didn't realize saxophones typically aren't part of the orchestra, and weren't included at all until modern times. Who knew! But my dad's a huge sax fan, so I felt like I needed to include them. I drew each cow/instrument individually, inked each, colored them with colored pencil, then scanned them into the computer.

Here's one of the original scans:

After I created a clipping path for each in Photoshop, I dumped them all into InDesign to do the arranging. I duplicated the cows to get the multiple instruments for the same section (which why, for instance, all the violins look identical - I'm not that crazy to draw all of those!) Then I drew a separate background and put that in. The hardest part was figuring out how to arrange them so you could still each cow/instrument. I love how the finished piece came out! And I made poster size, so I should be able to print it 18" x 24" eventually.