Last week I was inspired by Animal Alphabets on Twitter as they were drawing an Afanc. As it was the start of a new cycle and I found the whole concept of the Mythical Alphabets fascinating and fun, I decided to join in. The description of the Afanc was so clear that I thought it might be doable for me, seeing as I had recently worked on a beaver drawing.
The first thing I did to work on this picture was to download a Beaver and a Crocodile for guidance. I decided on pencils because that is what I like the most and have practiced with, plus I love black and white drawings in pencil.
At first it was quite hard, not going the way I wanted and I had to draw upon a lot more things, other pictures of beavers, my original beaver sketch to get the hair right.
I also had to find many other different crocodile photos so that the tail would be relatively at the right angle to work with the beaver fusion.
I made the beavers ears pointy instead of round because of the little demon element. I really enjoyed working on the tail, it was very crocodile like.
The most difficult part after this was his environment. I kept adding and adding to the hair and shading then developed a kind of waters edge as I wanted him to be by a lake.
The next day I found some images of water and tips for drawing water and worked for ages looping and shading the water so that it looked like water, then I asked my sister what she thought it was and she said the lake so that was good.
After this I found some photos of crocodiles in deserts and swamps and found it really hard to incorporate this with a pencil. Firstly I worked along the waters edge adding shrubs and grasses and went higher up the page with shading of this.
Adding the grasses made a difference. I had to go to the shops to buy a 7B and 8B pencil so as to really add the darker shading which made a difference. The hardest part was the far end of the picture, I could not imagine how to have it. One crocodile photo had a distant tree line so I decided on this, drawing a row of trees and shading in between them. From my journaling books I had how to draw scrolls so I made a scroll around the description of the Afanc. I was generally pleased with the finished result but found it very hard to draw a whole picture with just pencils. Still, it was a good experiment and opportunity to really go to town with the pencil shading!
The absolute highlight was sharing it on Instagram and having Animal Alphabets re-tweet it! I actually felt part of the group, taken seriously being able to actually put pencil to paper and make an actual drawing. None of the members there seem to judge which is really nice, they offered compliments and encouragement and this really added to my art journey. I'm so pleased to have discovered this, the weekly guidance of something interesting to draw is really helpful and needed.