please enjoy some black bear illustrations

Over my last summer semester, I set up a class project so that I could spend the whole time drawing black bears. They’re cute! I love em!

First cool fact is that they come in a ton of different coat colors. Quantitatively speaking, there are more brown black bears than black black bears, which is good party conversation material. I think the glacier gray in the top left of the color diagram is my favorite. He’s stickin’ his paw out at you for a high five. Don’t fall for it. It’s a trap.

I made some diagrams about how to differentiate brown bears from black bears. Admittedly, the features have more overlap and nuance between the two species than anyone under pressure to rapidly differentiate black and brown bears would ever want.

One of the best parts of this project was that I could go to the zoos in Chicago to get my own reference photos. We have black bears at the Lincoln Park Zoo in the city and grizzlies at Brookfield Zoo (where I’m getting my Master’s!) in the suburbs. I had lots of great opportunities to snap shots of the grizzly bears because they always seem to be out and active at Brookfield. Here’s the eldest grizzly showing off that big, chunky snoot and flat ears that are iconic identifiers of brown bears.

For the black bear, I had less opportunities. The section of Lincoln Park Zoo that includes the black bear habitat is closed off during the summer because state-endangered black-crowned night herons roost overhead, which are SO cool to see, but made this a bit more of a challenge. I had to go around the back of the exhibit to get any black bear portrait photos.

At first, I was worried that I wouldn’t get to take any of my own reference of the black bear- but he came near the fence so I was able to line up a few shots for the portrait. I was happy to get the shot that I wanted, and was able to just ignore the fence while painting! Sometimes we just have to work with what we’ve got, and it turns out, what we’ve got is plenty.