For my final Illustration class project, we were instructed by our teacher, Eddie Hale, to draw three illustrations from a book of our choosing. Taking my love for animals into account (and the decision that drawing animals was easier to draw than people), I chose Bryan Chick's "The Secret Zoo". The story involves a group of children - Noah, Ella, and Richie discovering a magical world of animal's beneath the city zoo after Noah's sister, Megan, goes missing exploring the mysterious happens surrounding the zoo - the animals seem to come and go as they please, whether it be in exhibits they shouldn't belong in or outside of the zoo itself. Deciding that I wanted to capture as much of the magic of this tale as possible, I went with a grey-scale and minimum color design in order to focus more on the details of the scenes.

This is the exact moment at which Megan disappears, leaving nothing more than a handful of notes she had made about the zoo animal's strange behavior. Mere moments after she has vanished, a band of red-eyed tree frogs - led by the curious individual above - discover her notes and snap them up with their long tongues, taking them with them so that Megan's disappearance may be discussed.

The Secret Zoo itself consists of a series of entire worlds - pocket dimensions, if you will - that exist beneath the Clarksville City Zoo, where the inhabitants can come and go as they please between worlds and exhibits via magic curtains that act as tunnels and passageways of sorts; each world corresponds and hooks up to an exhibit at the zoo and is usually dedicated to a single animal species or certain environment, depending on the exhibit it is attached to. At the hub of all these worlds is the City of Species, at sort of animal metropolis where humans and animals live in a beautiful and magical utopia. In addition to acting as a secret society, the Secret Zoo also functions as a sanctuary for all the world's animals and contains a number of species that have otherwise gone extinct in the outside world, hence why you can find a dodo bird in the lower right. How the Secret Zoo is able to function is quite simple - magic. Over the time, the magic that created and sustains the Secret Zoo has effected a vast majority of the animals that call it home, granting them basic intelligence and allowing others to accomplish things that would normally be impossible for them, such as letting penguins and dodos fly.

While not the main antagonists of the "The Secret Zoo" series, sasquatches, yetis, and other cryptid homonids are usually the most encountered and function mostly as the henchmen and minions of the series real villain. The Shadowist is a mysterious man whose goals and motives are a complete mystery. However, his intentions are quite clear and he wants nothing less than to infiltrate and obtain absolute control over the Secret Zoo and all its inhabitants. Preying upon the sasquatches solitary behavior, he has the ability to infect living creatures with a dark magic of his own - or twisting the already existing magic within the Secret Zoo - and turn them into terrible monsters of destruction and chaos.