Forty-five Grams in the Attic

I've begun work on my next drawing! The last one was meant to have been simple and relatively quick to complete. Well, it took three days. I thought maybe this time I should try not to repeat that.

So, I decided to try bats. Their skeletal structure is minimal making them an easy choice. Now I just had to pick one out of 1,240 bat species. (It's only an approximate figure!) That was when I discovered they were the second largest order of mammal species. Yay? I think.

After some searching and reading, I chose the Greater Mouse Eared Bat as the neutrality of the skeleton makes their silohet immediately identifiable as bat like.

The Greater Mouse Eared Bat. Apparently at 45 grams its beefy for a European bat...our bats are pewny!

With the images I had collected, I was able to make a rough sketch. When drawing these rough pictures I gather images of the animal with fur on as well as just the naked bones. It helps to build a picture of how it behaves, moves as well as understand it's physical limitations. Footage can help too. All this information goes towards creating a "pose" in my drawings.

For this particular drawing I needed to see how these little dudes affixed themselves to the ceilings of caves (and a lot of attics apparently.) I also wanted to make sure I was able to create a sense of weight because, although they are tiny, they aren't entirely weightless and using images as aides would help me to do just that.

I found that arcing the little guy's back slightly solved the weight issue and determined that keeping the toes only slightly apart and relatively taught was what gave the bats the firm grip that they have so I stuck that in too.

I forgot to take a picture of my rough sketch so I made the educated decision to replace it with a subed strip of Batty from FernGully.

I love his design, so flexibly expressive. I envy the guys who had the opportunity to animate him. Anyway thanks for reading.