day three-hundred-and-forty-nine - brown bear

brown bear munchin' on a brown bear munchin' on a brown bear

© jem barratt

brown bear shop

no explanation needed me thinks.

xj

day two-hundred-and-sixty-five - andean bear

one-hundred days to go yo!

and to celebrate that milestone, i have breaking news of express evolution in andean bears...

© jem barratt

a watercolour picture is not proof you say? well how about a photo smart-arse?

yeah. they love keeping abreast of the day's instances.

sometimes i think i must seem creative, what with my drawings of lemurs leap-frogging turtles and bears reading the paper, but ALAS all i can do is copy existing occurences. because we all know what happens when i try to be original. and if you didn't, you now do, which i really shouldn't have made you aware of!

xj

p.s. god DAMN you 'telegraph' for always listing alternative names for species. at first i thought this was a spectacled bear, and delighted in the chance to write "spectacled bear needs his spectacles" because it's clearly hilarious, but then spied the caption 'andean bear'
WELL apparently they are one and the same

p.p.s. one day i will draw something awesome and know lots of cool shit about it, just you wait!

day two-hundred-and-twenty - brown bear

can't talk, i'm all skewiff on a shitty couch right now...

AND i'm grumpy that my posca skillz/photoshop skillz weren't up to this challenge:

© jem barratt

maybe i should learn some life lessons from this couch and skewiff-y my thinking. it's not badly coloured in after all, it just perfectly depicts mr bear's fur. no biggy guys, just some perfection.

perhaps i was a little too quick to dismiss my terrible scanner - he definitely wouldn't have picked up all those 'lines' and all that 'detail'

yep. he.

how do i know my scanner's gender?
*wink*

xj

day fifty-two - sketchez

no excuses, but this is all you get:

© jem barratt

AND this.

oh! and also this:

you're welcome.
xj

day thirty-six - black bear

i love poscas! it's true. except when they spontaneously explode all over a perfectly finished painting.

more than that, i love the facial expressions of bears...

© jem barratt

i can never quite capture the 'off' look these animals have. here's the original. my goal art-wise, is not to improve my skill, but to be able to capture the stupid faces animals have. they really do (especially elephants).

sometimes it's cute. sometimes alarming. either way, 'tardish animal faces are one of the main reasons i love animals so much, and i need to spread the word.

xj

day thirty-one - sun bear

sun bears are (actually) one of my favourite animals. so much so that one of my loveliest friends adopted one at the adelaide zoo as a present for me. unfortunately they're one of my least favourite animals to see at the zoo. so what a terrible present that was.

(not really, but the sun bears pace. a lot. and as their official [i have a certificate] mother that makes me uncomfortable)

© jem barratt

i just have so much to say about sun bears! they are the smallest bears in the world, they wiggle when they walk (well when they climb - check 'life of mammals' if you don't believe me), they actually eat honey, they have incredibly long tongues, and they're so so sleepy.

i love that their sunny patch can also be viewed as the mess left over from all that honey they eat. sticky, sleepy, super-cute sun bears.

xj