dead animals

 

For my illustration elective's final, our main guideline was to create something based on some sort of personal anecdote.  What pretty immediately came to my mind was a dead goose that I had found with some friends when I was in elementary school.  We were used to finding dead things since we spent so much time at the creek or in ponds, but this one stood out because when you first looked at it, it seemed like a normal, dead goose, but when we got closer, you could see that there was a harsh line where it was submerged underwater, and everything under the water had been eaten away to perfectly clean bones.  The image of that clean division between the skeleton and untouched halves has stuck with me years later, so I jumped on the chance to be able to illustrate it.  

To give it a little more of a narrative, I also painted the rabbit and the sparrow, two of the less glamorous dead animal discoveries I made around that age.