This is the final ape image for a while, going to move onto dogs. This is the image that pound for pound probably took the longest out of all the images in the book. I originally tried to draw the boat but I'm not very good at drawing geometrical objects in perspective. Eventually I moved onto a simple 3D program and just built a little model which I rendered out and placed in the image before blending it in. I like the sense of whimsy. The colors worked out quite well too. Actually the color was settled long before I'd filled in all the detail which is kind of backwards for me, but sometimes you have to roll with the punches.

Half way through the piece I was forced to upgrade the memory on my computer to 3 gigs. I certainly stopped all the crashing that Creative Suite had a tendency to do with half that.

Oh yeah, damn near everything was done freehand other than the boat. I use a wacom tablet for stuff like this, its a godsend.