I’m certainly the five billionth person to do drawings of dog pilots (when they “dogfight” they’re literally dogs!! Get it?!) but for whatever reason, I recently wound up doing a batch of quick watercolors of dogs in WWII-era pilot gear. Well, “for whatever reason” isn’t entirely accurate; the reason is at least partially that I had just watched the recent documentary, Spitfire, about the WWII fighter plane of the same name. (Streaming on Amazon Prime btw. Watch it!)
So, here’re a few dogs:
But, hey, when I went to get pictures of these from my sketchbook, I remembered I’d done a couple of cats too! So, here they are:
If your first thought on seeing those was, “Hey, that’s kinda like MAUS, where the various factions are depicted as different animals,” that was pretty much a thought I had as well–except what came to mind was one of my fave “funny animal” comics, Apocalypse Meow (or Cat Shit One, as it’s known in Japan). Sadly out of print for ages here in the U.S., it’s a war comic with antro characters set in Vietnam.
Anyway, I like those cat and dog WWII characters, but I doubt I’ll ever do anything with them. I’m in the middle of a military/war book at the moment (Four-Fisted Tales) and when that’s done, I’m going to jump back on my antro animals book (In the Weeds), so I’ve kinda got both the “military” and the “animal characters” bit on the roster already.
Incidentally, those images were done with a materials combination I just recently started fooling with and very much like: watercolor, then finished with carbon pencil (and a bit of gouache for highlights). Here, for example, is a recent drawing of an alien I did using the same technique:
Recent Comments