Penguin Icons

I was looking into doing an icon set with a bunch of different kinds of one type of animal. I had a hard time finding a species that had at least 12 different types of animal. Then I started going through my favorite animals until I came to the penguin.

Before starting this icon set, I had no idea that there were 17 different types of penguins out there, and not all of them live on the Antarctic continent. Not all of them are equally cute and so I picked my top 12 and started designing.

I started by sketching out the different penguins on paper. One of the hardest things about creating these icons was trying to show the differences between the penguins, especially the ones with the yellow fringe of feathers around their eyes. This required me to do plenty of studying and research about their differences.

I originally was going to make all the icons the same size, but I thought it would be more fun to make them to scale. Now you can see that a white-flippered penguin is smaller than an emperor penguin's chick.

Hope you enjoy.