Blood, Sweat, and Beard Hair

I'm knee-deep in making an animatic right now(which I'll explain and post when I'm finished), but I wanted to take a break for a bit and post a picture.

Here we are, a lovely Arabian....ant.

There's a bit of information behind this, actually. And I feel I should probably explain myself a bit, this being the first picture and all.

First of all, yeah, she's an ant. That's why she has four ar

ms. I draw a lot of bug characters for some reason. Whenever I would doodle in my notebook or while on the phone or taking a break or something, my drawings always tend to lead towards bugs. I don't know, I guess I like bug cartoon characters because there's really no wrong way to draw a bug. You can exaggerate any feature, add any number of appendages, put as many eyes on them, and people would still say "Hey, nice bug!" They're like aliens or monsters, you can draw them almost any way you want and people would still recognize them. And for a cartoonist, this limitless exaggeration is most of the fun.

Second, a few months ago, I attended a design conference in Doha, Qatar. Qatar's a country right on the edge of Saudi Arabia, along the Arabian Gulf. It was also a trip for school, the art university I attended (VCU) has a sister school there, and we got to visit the facilities. There, I met a bunch of nice students, got to observe their art projects and even help out on a few. The Arabian influence was refreshing, since I was in a major where whether or not you were influenced by anime meant how your work was going to look.

While there, I was inspired to draw, make, or animate something Arabian-themed, and of course, what did I start drawing? Bugs. Ants, in particular. I picked ants for one of two reasons. One was that cartoon ants are either soldiers, or defending their ant hills from grasshoppers, I've never seen an ant drawn with an abaya or something like that. The second reason was I drew a comic in high school about Arabian ants, and thought I'd resurface that idea.

This picture in particular I sketched the week after I got home and never did anything with it until recently. I believe her clothes should really be black, but I chose purple because it was a little easier to see. Also the pattern in the background is based on some pottery I saw while visiting the museum of Islamic art. Pretty cool.

So there you have it. And here's some of the sketches I made over the trip if you're interested: