Endangered Creature Alphabet

After a few months of maintaining radio silence, I'm pleased to finally be able to talk about my involvement in the Endangered Creature Alphabet – a collaborative project organised by Matt Witt of creaturemag, an online arts blog dedicated to displaying the work of talented upcoming and established artists.

Officially launched today, the Endangered Creature Alphabet is "an illustrated collection of 26 threatened species, drawn by 26 talented artists". And I'm one of those artists!

Responding to a message put out on Twitter back in May for artists who wanted to be involved in the project, I emailed Matt expressing my interest, and was pleased to be selected to take part.

Each of the selected artists was given a letter of the alphabet and a corresponding animal to draw. The letter selected for me was M and my designated animal was the Mandrill. I was pleased with my selection – I'm always happy to draw a monkey – and enjoyed capturing this fierce but funny-looking creature. I was slightly suprised to learn that the mandrill was facing the possible threat of extinction, which I guess is one of the aims of this project, and hopefully it will help to educate more people about the plight of endangered species.



The completed illustrations have been gathered together and collected as an e-book, alongside a foreword by John Farndon, with each page giving some insight into the level of risk that each of these animals is facing.

To view the book, click on the image below and you'll be able to read through the pages online...

I was pleased to be asked to get involved with this project and to have the chance to work with other artists from across the globe. It's great that the current boom in social networking has made it so much easier to interact with other creative people and opens up new opportunities.

Thanks to Matt Witt and Creaturemag for devising the project, and I hope that it will help to enlighten and educate people to the plight of endangered species.