Dawn Cooper shares her favourite animal illustrations from Up Close.

 I normally get sent a handful of reference photographs from the author or publisher, but I’ll often spend time looking for my own reference images too.  Because I want the drawings to be as anatomically correct as possible, but not be in danger of copying someone else’s work, I’ll often make a bit of a Frankenstein style collage from different photos of an animal which I can loosely draw around, so I can get their limbs and things proportionally correct, but create my own poses.  

For one of the spreads I was asked to draw a Tufted Ground Squirrel, which is so rarely seen that very few images of it exist!  I had to try and draw from fuzzy night camera footage, and cross-reference it with other’s people’s artistic interpretations of what it might look like.  The finished squirrel probably doesn’t look quite as lifelike as some of the other animals in the book, but I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.

 One of the other challenges I had with ‘Up Close’ is that animals had to appear true to their actual size.  I remember I spent a lot of time painstakingly drawing an entire eagle, before realising that only its foot would fit on the page if it was life-size.

 I use a lot of stock imagery for reference, so sometimes it’s nice to find an old book of illustrations and draw inspiration from them; I have a huge book of beautifully illustrated birds which I inherited from my grandmother’s brother, which was a joy to draw inspiration from.