Happy Chinese New Year 2017 - The Year of the Chicken!

As you may know, today is the Chinese/Lunar New Year, and this year's zodiac animal is none other than the chicken!   Braaaawwk! Buk buk buk buk!

Yes, it's your year, Mr Chicken!

So, wishing you all a properous, safe, healthy, and happy year of the chicken!  Gong Hay Fat Choy!

~~~

After several weeks of woefully unsuccessful attempts (my first ended up being a duck!), tonight I finally managed to crack the "drawing a chicken" egg. "What is it?" really doesn't begin to describe the trickiness of what seemed to be such a straightforward assignment, right?! I mean, it's not as if I'm trying to match the famous drawings of a master Dutch cartoonist :P  Yet, for weeks, "successfully drawing something that resembles a chicken" proved to quite the challenge!

But then, something funny happened this evening. From this:

 Inspired by a lovely set of metallic garden sculptures (it was red, yellow, and blue) at Acquisitions a few years ago... The curvature of that sculpture had so much life in it, that my sketch is ways off capturing!

To these:

Hmm... I guess a mutant "Chick X Chicken Nugget" does not a chicken make!

Hey! There's no need to get all "chicken-wings" defensive about it! :P

And finally, this!

Finally, something resembling a chicken!

For the final image, I had the idea of including some rolling hills + a sunrise ('cause, you know, roosters). The hills were based on the iconic kaasts/hills in Guilin that I saw during our holidays last Christmas... since that day we took a train trip past all these in the mist (it's amazing, the scene was exactly like one of those classic chinese paintings), I've been wanting to try and recreate that effect using Grease Pencil. The end result today only partially managed to meet my expectations (they ended up looking more like eggs... but I guess it's appropriate given the occasion). That said, I think it ended up turning out reasonably well, everything considered :)

Yeah, and in case you haven't figured out yet, all of these were drawn using Grease Pencil (current master of course) :)