I remember this piece very well.  I almost threw it away.  I spent many hours using Pantone markers and Prismacolor colored pencils getting the details of their fur just right.  I wanted the eyes to have expression and depth.  I was pleased with it’s progress until I tried to create a background.  For some reason the grass and trees weren’t coming out the way I envisioned. They seemed too bright and did not look as good as the animals.  I was crushed!  Then I thought I could save it by making the background solid black.  You can still see some of the black around the mane.  But that didn’t work either.  Finally in a last ditch effort to save all of my hard work, I got my x-acto knife and started the grueling task of cutting the giraffes out.  I had to be so careful.

In the end, I decided to…