The art challenge at work for next Monday is to draw a penguin that is different than the penguins that we draw and see at work every day (if you know where I work, this will make a great deal of sense as being quite the challenge).

Instead of going the cartoony route, I decided to attempt a more realistic penguin using Photoshop. It’s a Rockhopper penguin, which is one of the coolest penguins due to its big yellow eyebrows. Here’s the result:

Estimated creation time: 2-3 hrs. Have I ever mentioned how amazed I am at artists who will work on the same painting for 50+ hours? I am in awe at that level of patience and dedication to getting every detail perfect. Unless I was attempting a wall mural or something, I don’t think I could do it.

At work, we’ll sometimes have art challenges. There’s a wide variety of art challenges that we’ve done, but usually, the challenge is that every artist has to draw something based on an open-ended subject.

This week, the art challenge was “Strange Walkers“. I immediately thought of a neat concept for it, so that’s what I worked on today for two hours. My Photoshop skills are pretty rusty, so this gave me the perfect excuse to practice. It’s no masterpiece, but I’m pretty happy with it. (The photograph I used was a photo of a random residential area in England that I found on Google.)

Here’s the rough that I started with, if you’re interested (this only took about 2-3 minutes).