Ostrich is Flying!

I made this piece months ago, but I just realized that I never posted it on my blog. Oops!

I created a piece for the SVS Third Thursday competition, responding to the prompt, "None of the animals could believe their eyes. The aircraft worked! For the first time Ostrich was actually flying!"

I got a bit of feedback on my original idea here:
http://forum.svslearn.com/topic/439/third-thursday-start

And then created my piece. This is what I turned in for the competition:

And, while it didn't win a free class, it DID win a critique (what I was really after anyway ;-). You can watch the critique here, starting at about 51:44:

And this is the edited version I made based on the critique I received. I chose which corrections I felt were most interesting while also do-able in a reasonable amount of time. Obviously, when not working with an Art Director its up to me to decide how to best make corrections, as well as how much time I want to put in before calling it done. I agree with the suggestion that adjusting the gestures of ALL the animals would be helpful, but would require soooo much re-drawing and ultimately would just be putting more into this piece than I personally feel would be helpful. That would have been a correction best made in the sketching stage I think. I do feel that the piece is much improved now.