Scientific Illustration : Zebra

It's unfinished yes.

Not so fun bit about this. So, scratchboard is a technique that works great on contrast but it's amazing for anything that has fur or hair; if you search on google, you'll find mostly animals done with this technique because of the fur, and the results are absolutely amazing.  

So during the Scientific Illustration course, we finally got to the scratchboard technique and I couldn't wait to start. The teacher told us to bring photos of that we'd like to use and during class we'd pick one. I brought MANY pictures of tigers, lions and lemurs from the time I worked at the zoo, and among those picture, I also brought along a zebra (above), and this ended up being my biggest mistake.

The teacher became obsessed with this photo because it was a black and white animal and perfect to show the big contrast. Thing is, the photo was small, had absolutely no detail of fur (which is what the scratchboard works best) and honestly it was boring because there was basically only two tones in this. So while everyone did amazing illustrations of close-ups of lions, dogs and cats with amazing details, I was forced to do this zebra that is the most boring thing, requires  no detail, and doesn't show how amazing this illustration technique actually is. 

Suffice to say I was NOT happy, I hated doing this, it frustrated me to no end and it was incredibly disheartening. The teacher only approached me twice during the four hours of work basically to say "Looks nice" while she praised absolute realism and amazing work on fur and details of everyone else's works; she realized it was NOT a good idea in the end, and avoided her mistake by avoiding me.

Terrible four hours, I tell you. 

So in the end, let me tell you this? If you think it's best to do art in a way, even if your teacher tells you no? Insist on it. Your gut instinct matters and if I had followed mine, I wouldn't have ended frustrated and annoyed, with a picture that is not even close to the things I'm certain i can achieve. 

Said this, I already bought all the materials i need and the next picture will be the goddamn tiger I had been meaning to illustrate since the day the teacher said we were going to do scratchboard.