Recently we’ve received complaints from customers demanding more new undiscovered squirrels in the calendars. As the artist, my initial response is “Com’mon people, are they trying to kill me? I need sleep too.” Then Anne (President of Arundale Products) chuckled and reminded me that this was actually a good complaint. People love the images and they want more. As referenced in a previous post “The Undiscovered Squirrels” the creation of each undiscovered squirrel is no simple task. Because of the limited production time for illustration, layout, designing, and editing we decided a few years ago to only add a limited number of new squirrels to each upcoming calendar, to lighten the work load, to extend the series out, and to give new customers a chance to discover the favorites of previous years. New ideas are constantly being tossed around through out the year and I’m always on the look out for the next crazy awesome hypothetical squirrel idea.

One difficulty we have when selecting new “animal” are the requirements for keeping our little guys cute, fuzzy, and being able to still look like squirrel at the final stage. Sorry, there will be no Octopus Squirrel in our calendars. It crosses our “Is it cute?” line and squirms right into something one might find in an H. R. Giger series. I certainly mean no disrespect to his work, after all I own several of his books. The Octopus Squirrel, and other hybrids of that vein, simply do not fit into what we want to create and share with our customers.

What exactly are the requirements for a potential Undiscovered Squirrel “animal”? Mammal, easily identifiable features to distinguish it from other animals, and appears significantly different than a squirrel. This last requirement is why the “Rabbit Squirrel” is a no show, the two animals look too much alike, the final product wouldn’t appear very “undiscovered”.

Cute, yes, undeniably so. While cute is a requirement, it is not the over all goal for the undiscovered series. If one removes the tail off of the squirrel or adds a squirrel tail to the rabbit, the end product wouldn’t carry that same intriguing quality that the other undiscovered squirrels possess.

I’m always eager to hear idea from others, even if the idea isn’t chosen, there is always the potential for an outside idea to generate an even more fantastical Undiscovered Squirrel to present next year.

In this most recent edition I created the Armadillo Squirrel, this was by far the most ambitious of the series. There were so many opportunities for this little armored one to fail. He’s technically a mammal, has fur and definitely stands out in a crowd, but his leathery armor was tricky to manipulate. It was simple enough to create the “shell” but the bulk of the work went into directing him in a cute direction. Real armadillo body armor is made up of small plates of bone, each covered by a layer of horny skin and separated from its neighbors by soft skin from which sparse hairs grow. This intricate armor was recreated in a similar fashion but with the coloring and fur texture of a squirrel. All the while, in the back of mind I was hoping “please don’t end up looking like some freakish alien turtle”. I put off the tail for last. It took several weeks to develop viable a plan of attack for negotiating how to integrate the banded armadillo tail into the fluffy squirrel tail and have the two appear feasible. After a great deal of patience, adherence, and humility to hit command-Z repeatedly the image was complete.

Hopefully the next round of Undiscovered Squirrels will be just as unexpected as their predecessors and, as always, we hope people will take the same amount of enjoyment from them as we get from coming up with them.

The 2012 Undiscovered Squirrel Calendar is available at www.SquirrelStuff.com

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