Happy November!

It’s been a while since I did one of my 10-day drawing challenges. The last one I did was a study of birds.

Well, to keep the theme going, I’m going to do mammals this time! it’s broad enough to roll in many of my favorite (or at least important and overdue) things: wildlife photography, cats, organizing my photos, uploading my backlog of nature observations to iNaturalist.
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It’s also a great excuse to read up some science.

I will be posting daily mammal sketches from November 18th to 28th. If you’d like to follow along day-by-day, you can check my Tumblr or Bluesky. And naturally, I'll share the full gallery by email next month.

Here’s my progress on this project far:

• I’ve looked up and selected categories of mammals to draw.
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• I went through my own photo archive for animal photos.
  (The “good” news is that, for most of my life, I was not a very good wildlife photographer or photographer in general, so I didn’t actually have that many pictures to go through.
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  The actual good news is that I have been pretty good over recent years about cataloging and indexing my photos, so it wasn’t hard to inventory what I had.
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  And I have some recent nature photography that I’m proud of, and I’m excited to show.)
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• I’ve cued up outside reference photos for animals I haven’t photographed myself.

So that’s coming up! I’m looking forward to some cozy drawing time.

Meanwhile, here is my related art and writing in this month’s Art and Writing delivery.

Art & Writing Delivery

What I Learned from Setting Myself Five Creative Challenges The characteristics the successful ones had in common In the space of about a year, I set myself five personal creative challenges. Of the five challenges, three were decidedly successful, and two had mixed results. Looking back, I have an inkling of what made the successful challenges work so much better than the others. Read more

A Delightful Week of Bird Drawing And learning about ‘birbness’ It occurred to me that I’d like to be able to draw birds in my usual semi-realistic style. To do that, I’d need to learn more about bird anatomy, and maybe do some studies from real life ... Read more

In the Works

My novel, Fire's Ally, is coming out in its regular edition in January! I'm hard at work proofing the print version.

Hope you are having a cozy and creative season as well.

Best wishes,

-Deepti

P.S. I'm starting to send these round-ups more regularly. You can find all recent newsletters here, so feel free to delete them from your inbox if the file sizes get big.