The Screaming Hairy Alebrije adds a little extra to his protection routine. Like all armadillos, he rolls into a ball when threatened. Due to his glittering colors, he then resembles a disco ball ,and his enemies cannot resist dancing until they run away. He is seldom attacked by the same enemy twice, because, really. Who dances to disco these days?
The armadillo has pretty simple shapes – a triangle head and half-circle body, so drew him freehand, adding the most important detail such as the eye, and where the thickest bands are.
I didn’t have to overthink the patterns, because nature has already added that for these guys. I went with heavy shadows and thick lines – a .5 nib technical pen for sure!
I’m still playing with the Brea Reese Watercolor Inks. This time I just used the bottled inks, pouring a little bit into plastic dishes and picking the color with a waterbrush.
The colors are glitter pink, glitter gold, blue Lake, kelly green and neutral gray. The Brea Reese golds tend toward the green. The colors are brighter than they appear in the scan. The glitter throws off the scanner.
Years ago, I found a set of plastic hors d’oeuvre dishes at Bimart for a dollar and they come in so handy for this kind of thing. Unless I manage to crack to many of them, there were enough in the set to last me forever.
You can buy Hahnemühle Rough Watercolor Postcards at these places:
- Rochester Art Supply FineArtStore
- Jerrys Artarama
- Wet Paint Artist Materials & Framing
- Hyatt’s All Things Creative
You can buy Zebra Zensation Technical Pens here.
You can buy Brea Reese Watercolor Inks here:
that pink color is really pretty ! while living in Florida I saw many armadillos, none as pretty as yours! ❤
The pink is really glittery too. It doesn’t show very well in the scan. We don’t have any armadillos here in Oregon. One of its major flaws. That and the taxes.