#365Cow - The First 16

Oye! It's January 16th already. Between work, starting the new school semester, a scrapbooking retreat with friends, and foolishly packing my colored pencils away for a week and half - I haven't had a lot of time to post. I'm finally catching up, so here's the first 16 cows, fully colored:

New Year's Cow

The rest are a part of a "Disney Gals" series I started sketching out a few months ago.

Nice to finally get them finished!

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.

Animals Playing Instruments

Doodle United's latest theme was "Animals Playing Instruments." I was super excited when they posted it (cows!). While I had cow plans, I did also color some banjo playing pigs I drew a long while back:

These are inspired by the site Dueling Banjo Pigs. Colored in Painter.

Next, I drew a couple of individual cows playing some unique instruments. 

Medieval Cow playing a hammered dulcimer.
Inspired by my love for the middle ages, the desire to one day learn to play the hammered dulcimer, and an obsession/longing to join 3 of my friends in SCA. (one day!)

Highland Cow, in a kilt, playing the bagpipes.
Inspired by my friend Elise, who has a fierce love/obsession with both Highland cows and all things Scottish. 

The fourth piece I did, I will post in the next post - because it's pretty epic . . .
 CLICK HERE FOR NEXT POST.

Oops! New Unicorns

About to post the lasted Doodle U and realized I never posted my unicorns from 2 themes ago. Anyhoo, here they are. See everyone else's unicorns HERE.