Penguins, Ice, Drums and Africa

If the title sounded odd, it’s because I’m posting two works. I’ve been in hiatus since December (I even typed Elysiun to get here), but here’s a couple renders I’ve done to start warming back up. I don’t know if links to Deviantart are in poor form, but kindly forgive my lack of proper image hosting. I’m not a fan of things like imageshack.

First is a model of a plush penguin I own with an icy Blender logo.
Ice texture from nVidia’s free texture pack, rest is Blender. Would have liked to have done caustics, but I guess that only works with yafray?
http://www.deviantart.com/view/37180210/ (1280x1024)

Second was a gift for my mother’s birthday. She likes African themed items, so it’s an African drum with an African landscape ‘planted’ in the drum head. I guess the pond looks rather cheap, I was in a rush to finish. Cloth, wood, and dirt textures from nVidia’s pack, rest is Blender. Acacia tree generated with l-system script (with a bit of manual post-editing), but the leaves were static particles.
http://www.deviantart.com/view/37347754/ (612x792)

Like the african drum.

That is a very nice shader on the penguin - keep it up!

I think the african garden would look cool with a tiny elephant or herd thereof. Or that’s a lame idea, I can’t decide.

The African garden is an interesting concept, but the pattern on the drum strikes me more as Greek than African.

I like them both. Especially the little tree on the drum. By the way, you can host images on this forum if you choose to, but any other site’s fine with me, as long as it works.

the penguin looks dirty with that texture, you’re mixing up the toon modelling with more realistic texturing, although i’ve never seen a penguin who had feathers like that. The african drum i quite like, but the pond looks more like bare rock than water to me.

its a plush penguin, which is a kind of stuffed toy penguin.