Sailing Fish

Yep, another fish.

I enjoyed the problem-solving of my last piece, the barracuda, and wanted to try that all again. Now that I had one picture under my belt I figured I could do a better job if I went for it again. That turned out to be mostly true, but there was still some back-and-forth with the smaller choices.

Also, choosing a different fish is gonna present a whole new set of challenges no matter how prepared you are. For my second pic I wanted to do a Sailfish (which I originally thought was a Marlin). I love their long, pointy noses and giant fins. Their proportions are outta control; they're already caricatures of themselves. The main challenge here was that gigantic fin on his back and the colored stripes on his body. The fin itself took a lot of time to design and polish.

Like always, I started with some sketches. These were easier to produce because I was kinda already in 'fish mode'.

The end design was a combination of the top one and the face of the bottom one in the second pic.

Again, from there it was the same process of laying in colors, importing certain things from the Barracuda pic, like the scales layer, and eventually adding thick, clean lines around the edges.

The background took a while to settle on; it's easy to make a dark wall with a wallpaper-y pattern feel like an abandoned house. I pushed against that as best I could, cause I really wanted an appealing background with a subtle pattern.

 

On a weird side note, I remembered while working on this pic that I'd actually painted a Sailfish/Marlin-type fish way back in high school art class. It was done on a tiny canvas with acrylics, and I remember at the time thinking it was the coolest thing I'd ever done. It was so much more vivid and colorful than most of the other stuff I was doing at the time. Looking back, it's funny to see how far I've come in pretty much every facet of art. Maybe I should fix it up at some point..

(circa 2002)

Until next time...