Rob Funderburk Studio Blog

Above, preliminary pencil stage of an illustration for an upcoming Beastiary from Chicago’s ACM — here, pilots in planes painted with teeth emulate skyborn sharks in their flyover of a football game, one team entering the field enthused with their embodiment of the team’s animal moniker. Distinction will come with inkwork; it’s hard to understand the image pending differentiation of lights & shadows, edges & such, but I’m saving definitive ink & style-locking till after negotiating concepts on, say, 8 or 10 of these to be consistent in execution. Intending to cut loose some from the literalness in these established pencil bases, btw (others posted so far are tagged “ACM Bestiary Pencil”), use more loosely-slung linework or quasi-geometric interjections in the ink stage and keep it fresh. Here in these pencils are the figuring of a narrative support structure — ultimately would like for these to operate something like mazes in that initially there’s an overwhelming interplay of shapes that starts to yield connections over a recreational duration (…yeah, admittedly, I’m probably over-thinking it, but hey, it’s my kicks…). A couple characteristics of Bestiaries from antiquity are their imprecision in relaying facts and susceptibility to diversion — so with these I’m creating premises in which characters are relaying interpretations of animals or experiencing some embellished understanding of them, typically with a lot of word- or thought-balloons.