Menagerie

I've been working on a menagerie of fantasy creatures that I'm planning to make out of modeling clay, and I thought I'd share some of my sketches. I'm thinking of using purples and pinks in all of the designs, because those colors remind me of magic and dragons and that sort of thing, but I drew a few in different colors just to see what they looked like.

Dr. Seuss is a huge inspiration in these designs. He really was the king of inventing bizarre creatures, such as this scraggle-foot Mulligatawny from the book If I Ran the Zoo:

Another big inspiration is Winsor McCay, who is possibly best known for his pioneering animated film Gertie the Dinosaur. He really came up with some amazing hybrid animals in his comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland:

I should also mention Ward Kimball, who probably had the wildest imagination out of all of the great animators working at the Disney studio in the '30s, '40s and '50s. This is a beast he came up with for an episode of the Disneyland TV show in 1955, titled Mars and Beyond:

I'll post more soon.