08/09/2026
Gator ### Sketches:
Favor for an old friend, Mr. Barry Guilliot, on the 30th anniversary of his middle school group, the Louisiana Wetland Watchers K-12 Service-Learning Project - one of George Lucas's Edutopia recipients, and the group who inspired my Gator Aid drawing.
The plan is to build a new gator design made of all the critters his kids have been cleaning up the bayous to protect - with a ### grill representing the 30 year milestone.
(Yes, this is the first new drawing I've done since 2024.)
I began by collecting a variety of alligator faces - a task complicated by reference search engines that can’t tell the difference between alligators and crocodiles. Still the effort produced many images, from which I selected these candidates for study.
One was distorted a bit to fit a more horizontal format, in the process producing shapes that suggested a variety of swamp-dwelling creatures (Third Row, Left).
My mind's eye can imagine a crab sitting on top of this one's head, and eyebrows that seemed like crawfish claws. That was enough to get me started.
