Wacky Animal Mashups

Hey all, Kate here! I’m the online instructor for The Arterie, as well as a social media content creator and zine-writer. I’m super excited to be taking over today’s blog post to talk about one of my favorite creative drawing exercises- Animal Mashups!

If you’ve been following our Instagram, you may have seen our recent foray into Instagram Live sessions, which I host every Sunday at 2:30 PM Pacific Time. It can be hard to find time to sit down and be creative with the chaos of daily life, so this short 30 minute live session is a nice way to cultivate a weekly habit. I encourage our viewers to draw along and listen while I rant and ramble about a different topic each week, demonstrating drawing exercises and prompts, my own art process, or snippets from class projects.

This past Sunday, I showed how to create some strange new creatures by combining the animals we all know and love. This is a great warm-up activity before starting a class project, or it can be a good prompt if you’re sitting down to draw and don’t know where to start. It combines core drawing fundamentals with creative problem-solving, and the end results can be delightfully hilarious (or occasionally, nightmare-inducing!) It’s well-suited for all ages and skill levels, and the kids love sharing their wacky creature creations.

All you need is your preferred medium for drawing, and access to some kind of photo reference of animals. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to start drawing an animal, and realized I haven’t the slightest idea what it actually looks like. Just try and picture an anteater in your mind… what kind of feet does it have? Does it have long fur, or short? What kind of tail does it have? All of these questions can be answered with a quick Google image search. Or, if you’re a reference hoarder like myself, you may have a collection of laminated calendar pages featuring all sorts of different animals. My mom, being most resourceful, made them as a teaching aid when I was little. After finding them tucked away in the attic a few years ago, I decided to keep them as another tool in my art-making arsenal. I also stumbled upon this cool website that randomly generates animal pictures for you.

In the video below, I describe the animal mash-up process. Start by taking time to look at the features of each animal, compare and contrast their traits, and use your imagination to combine them and create your new creature!