This is my little buddy! He's what they call the "Least Weasel," and he's an endangered species. I made this my freshman year in an Adobe Illustrator class. We were told to emulate the style of Rocco Baviera, and to pick an animal that's endangered in and around Indiana.

Here are some examples of the style we were to emulate:

I looked through a list of endangered species, and I thought the Least Weasel was the absolute cutest, so I decided to do my project on them!

Below, I have some reference images that I found on the interwebs:

From the reference images we found, we had to create thumbnails to get a general idea of what we would want our finished project to look like. Here are mine:

Then, we had to take our favorite thumbnail and make it into a "finished" grayscale sketch, complete with shading and cleaner lines:

Finally, we had to create our finished project in Illustrator! It had to be in cull color, have gradients, and, most importantly, be in Baviera's style!

We could do just about whatever we wanted for the background of our little boxed-in area, and I felt like, since I decided to use warm browns in the color of the weasel, a nice, light green would look lovely.  And since the weasel's eyes/face follow the rule of thirds and creates a lot of weight on the left side of the composition, I decided to add a little daisy behind my guy to balance it out more.

Flash forward to this year! My professor encourages us to implement these designs in some way into the real world. I decided to name this little guy Hank and put him on a sticker!

But I went a step further and created a (fake) Redbubble page just for him!

Hope you enjoyed! Thanks for looking!