Guinea Pig Studies

I’m working on a new comic, one that features a guinea pig that had some big adventures during the Russian advance on Kyiv in February 2022. (Since this is based on a true story, I’d like to make the guinea pig at least somewhat recognizable!) We owned a couple of guinea pigs as kids but that was a long time ago plus neither was the smooth-haired variety like Mister Ginger, so I’ve been doing some online image research (anatomy, though there is precious little available about musculature) and different poses, including some video I took at a PetSmart in Brunswick, Maine on Monday.

Getting the guinea pig to look “right” as a somewhat drawn-from-life animal is essential before I can turn this into the plucky heroic character of my story, and today was a bit of a test to see how far I’ve come. The ears are completely eluding me: you don’t want them upright (too much like a capybara), you don’t want them small (too much like a rat), you don’t want them big (too much like a chinchilla) and in fact in many photos of guinea pigs you hardly see them at all. It’s definitely back to the drawing board tomorrow, but I thought I’d share some progress sketches… There is a new PetSmart in town that might have some live guinea pigs, which would be a great place to start.