My idea is to create a Bestiary; a compendium of fantastical creatures, filled with illustrations and information about a variety of creatures pulled from a wide range of mythologies from all around the world, such as from the Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Gaelic legends. My brother is obsessed with all lore and has agreed to help with the research component of my project.
I have a sketchbook dedicated to researching and developing this project to keep all if my work together in something linearly traceable. I will be trying to complete a few small drawings a day, as discussed with Marcia, that will become more relevant and targeted as my project develops.
By the end I would like to use a leather cover to store the completed pages in, however I have been thinking about experimenting with book binding – I’ve been told that there are some good books on some simpler techniques – but it depends on what materials I have access to. Due to the lockdown my resources are somewhat more limited than I had planned.
As I mentioned I am using a sketchbook to document and work on my project, but as for the final piece, the finalised bestiary, I am hoping to use a leather cover/an affordable method of bookbinding and handmade paper. As for the illustrations, other than sketching with a pencil, I haven’t decided on the best medium. I want each page to keep within an atmosphere of spontaneity; as though the author is an explorer and naturalist, travelling around trying to record all the creatures they encounter on their travels. For this effect I’m leaning towards using ink and fine liners. I feel they would add a freehand, sketchy feel to the pictures, as though they were done in a rush to capture the creatures in their habitat.
Learning Plan
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I will look for illustrators who focus on wildlife and/or imagining mythical creatures, for example Nico Marlet, Juanra Peralta and Rose Smith. I will be using this project as a way to develop my skills in traditional illustration, particularly being able to create more fluid, quick sketches as opposed to my current, highly detailed, time consuming style.
Due to difficulty with accessing libraries at the moment, I will concentrate mostly on online resources, especially during the initial research.



To start with, I made a few sketches of Dragons and Jackalopes, which are also the creatures I've mainly focussed on so far through my research. I've never drawn any of the Leporids or Lepus so I've been practicing them quite a bit.
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I wanted to make sure that I could actually draw the things to fill my bestiary with, hence the practice.

Someone in my seminar group suggested that I use Acrylic Paint Pens, so here's the experiments I did with them.








The first two dragons are A4 paint pen renditions, unfortunately I didn't have a very wide range of colours to use, so it was hard to put together the colour palette I wanted. So, to show my original intentions, I created digital versions.




Both Sidney Sime and Nico Marlet are both very well known for their work illustrating mythical creatures. You may recognise Marlet's work from 'How to Train your Dragon', however Sime's work was published in the 1920s




I had a copy of the book 'Alice's Adventures Under Ground' by Lewis Carol in the authors handwriting, so I decided to develop my own font by picking up and adopting letters found in this book and improvising the ones I couldn't find an example of. This is the lettering I will use to be the handwriting of my unnamed narrator.


These were some more practice sketches I made of Jackalopes before preparing the page. I will be selecting a couple of illustrations for the A5 page, and preparing a short paragraph about the creature.
Jackalope Pages:



Here is the jackalope page, I decided to sketch a couple of poses and write a bit about them, before finalising the colour choices and labelling them for painting the final page.
Plush Jackalope



I have a book of patterns to make small stuffed animals, two of which are deer and rabbits! So of course, I combined the two into my very own stuffed Jackalope, a.k.a. Jackalopsy! I named it Lopsy, as it is rather lop-sided. I completed the jackalope entirely on a sewing machine, and stuffed it with a polyester-fibre-stuffing. I'm very proud of it! I expected it too be fiddley and difficult, but I think it went well! It was very experimental but I really like the results.
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I'd like to use this as part of my project, I might say that it's a childhood toy of my narrator - maybe one made by their mother - and there could be a story attached about ow she was making my narrator a rabbit, but that they had seen one with antlers and demanded they be added to the toy.
Roc/Rokh/Rukh/Ruc
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Roc's are honestly really interesting - they're enormous predatory birds characterised by large talons and powerful wings. They originate in Arabia and there is record of them being linked to the sun and so they are sometimes portrayed as breathing fire, other times they are shown as carrying away full grown elephants to kill and eat. As the fire-breathing/link to the sun is not a set or consistent part of the myths so I decided not to include it, I did however decide to include the preying on elephants.
The Wendigo Pages




Wendigos are a long time favourite creature of mine, they're disturbing, and they're fascinating. Apparently the deer-skull, antlered wendigo we are used to seeing is inaccurate to the original myths, so I chose to follow those more closely. They depict the wendigo as mostly humanoid, gaunt and bony, grey skinned, and enormous. I didn't include a scale but I elongated the wendigo's limbs and neck to give the impression of 'largeness'.
Wendigo Page




With Brownies I wanted to lean into the playful and cute illustration series, I included a couple of examples of them in the first two photographs above. This also lends well to the idea that the brownies looks trick the owners of the land or livestock into assuming they aren't capable of great violence. I decided to include a happy, appeased brownie, and an unhappy, vengeful brownie in the final page.
Selkies




I do quite like selkies. They are a race of people that wear the skin of a seal to appear as one, and when they take it off they appear to be human. The females are generally characterised as being "excellent wives" and are depicted as being kidnapped and trapped by human men who steal their skins to keep them stranded. The males are characterised as seducers, generally targeting married women who were unsatisfied with their husband or martial situation - for example, the wives of fishermen, whose husbands were away for long periods of time. I decided to draw a selkie in seal form and a female selkie in human form, as they are the focus of the myths.