Weary Donkey

A little while ago, a friend asked me to draw this picture of a donkey for a script pitch he and his wife were working on. Whilst he is an animator, he freely admitted to not being able to draw a horse and thought of me (which brings up another point - that us artists and possibly in particular animators were the people our friends used to turn to when we were kids to draw to back end of a horse). He had to look tired and a bit beaten up, but sympathetic too. In typical fashion, they wanted it in about a days turnaround, and they wanted it to look like a turn of the (19th) Century illustration and I immediately thought of T.S. Sullivant. Funnily enough I didn't even think to look at the Donkey out of Shrek for reference, but after a couple of quick roughs and emails back and forth this is what I came up with. It was suprisingly difficult to find a Sullivant picture of a horse - loads of hippo's. This Zebra was my closest bet.
This horse was hiding from me.
These guys helped with the look of the line style.