Illustrate a factoid, they said. Okay, I said.
The Quagga Project is attempting to recreate an extinct subspecies of Plains Zebra by 'breeding backwards', so to speak, to get those ancestral Quagga qualities back out in the open. My very first thumbnails for this image involved a whole bunch of DNA helices and all manner of cluttered nonsense on top of zebra stripes, but I stripped it down to the following color comp:
Then I actually documented my 'process' this time 'round, which was basically a blind plunge into whatever media I could get my hands on. The final product ended up being composed of watercolor, marker, colored pencil, liquid ink, acrylic paint, one billion layers of matte spray fixative, and gouache. Criminy.
Recently I've whittled my materials down to about half of those media, but here's the final piece with proper scanned detail and no nasty yellow lighting:
This remains one of my favorite pieces to date, despite the unorthodox approach I took to finalize it. It's about 10.5 inches square.
