In late 2021 returned to making art after having considered myself retired from artistic practice since 2012. I wanted to start with something with fairly low friction that could be sustainable. I decided to do something in the vein of Incidentals (series 1, series 2) since the art style was quirky and simple. I had been looking through scans of my sketchbooks and found a bunch of cute creatures, most of which were four-legged. I selected a handful of these sketches to work up, and “random quadrupeds” was born.
As this started as an experiment to see whether or not I could stay engaged in making images, I decided to make at least one quadruped illustration per day, and post it to twitter (@edpas_). These also turned out be among my first tweets on my account, which had been almost completely dormant since I registered it in 2014.
Some of the quadrupeds were based on sketchbook drawings, but I began most of them directly on the computer. My digital art has almost exclusively been vector based, so I dusted off my copy of Adobe Illustrator CS3 and pulled an old Wacom tablet out of storage, but was frustrated with the indirectness of the tablet. Especially after having played around with drawing apps in the early iPad years. So I bought myself a small Huion Kamvas display tablet to see if it would make things less frustrating. The Kamvas helped immensely, and the Random Quadrupeds project proved to be sustainable. I kept at it for about three months, until I moved on to more ambitious work.
The entire body of work includes:
- 75 unique quadrupeds
- 21 alternate versions of 8 of the core 75
- a few animated GIF versions
- 6 merfolk-like creatures
- 12 “non-binary zebras”
- an additional 14 “egg people”: 6 normal eggs, and 8 century eggs. The “century egg” quadrupeds/people became the seed of an idea that grew into Chonky Bug People.
Below are contact sheets showing 68 of the unique images from the series.
