The character I chose for this assignment was an opossum I dubbed Mordume. He was shot and presumably left for dead outside an apartment building. Guarded by children, he was soon picked up by a cop with a penchant for saving wild animals. Taken to a vet who also specialized in saving wild folk, he was given surgery that would have cost $9000 and an estimated $700 more would be needed in terms of food and supplies before he was ready to be released.
Read the original article here.


Ah Mordume. Such a life.

Here’s the final version of Monkey Spider (for lack of a better name).

From the beginning I enjoyed doing this spirit animal assignment. Thinking up a spirit animal and developing it was a good exercise in character development.

Initial idea.

Character sheet.

By the end of it, I had a strong sense of who the character was, its desires and the environment it lived in. The only thing I failed at was finding its name. Perhaps its destined not to have one.

The interconnected world assignment was a bit rough though.
Drawing and Story here.

All of the animals in the world came in with strong identities, and making them work together was quite a stretch. In the end, we managed to put together a story to describe how they interacted, but no sort of taxonomy diagram we could think of would have worked without being awkward or requiring our characters to change.

Had we started this series of work with the last assignment in mind it may have made a difference. Perhaps the most interesting thing that came out of this was me figuring out that drawing something by hand and then tracing the path gives me a result that I really kind of like.

My spirit animal. The toughest thing about him so far is his name. He has a very elusive name. Perhaps it will come to me one day. I feel like it’s close.

About him.



The first thing you must understand is that he doesn’t do it will ill intent. Ever so rarely things go wrong but that’s just an unfortunate eventuality. It’s the risk of it, the thrill of the chase, the satisfied feeling of a plan well laid that really drives him. He is a trickster at heart and it’s what he does best.
Yea, when things go bad he hides. But it isn’t without trouble. Taking the shape of a spider (and the reverse transform as well) is no laughing matter. If he must, he always hides first. No one has ever seen the complete change.

traits

He is calm most of the time, though he may smile slightly if planning a spectacular piece of trickery.

Few things can make him angry, but when he does… watch out!

He sometimes plays human and put on clothes. Sometimes he gets caught, but mostly not. He wraps up his tail and wears custom made shoes to cover his long feet.