Fantasy Fish

Many influences feed into my art work, whether it's sculpting or sketching, and amongst those are television programmes and movies. I particularly like the Discovery Channel and so with this influence today's subject is fish. My end goal is to create a fantasy fish so to feed my imagination I take several images of fish that I find interesting, even if some are more than just a little peculiar, and sketch the parts that created the interest. For example, I started with the Handfish, so called because it looks like it has hands...

 

I'm not concerned with the rest of the fish, just the 'hands' but the patterning is striking and I may incorporate it so I put that into the sketch as well...

 

 Next is a fish I don't know the name of but it's fierceness in its appearance attracts me...

 

Already I'm starting to conceive a deep water creature looming menacingly out of the dark and although no ideas are set in stone yet I'm probably leaning towards reference material that will support that type of fantasy creature.

I love the name of this one, Sea Dragon, which sends my imagination off on another idea! I'm sticking with the prehistoric looking fish and just by observing and sketching them it helps create images that my imagination can use to create a new and weird creature.

There's definitely something gothic or macabre about my choice of fish to sketch but I think they are a rich starting point for hopefully developing a strong fantastical image. I will keep sketching and building my own reference of images in my imagination until I have a strong sense of the drawing I want to create.

Fantasy Head - Skull with Horns - Finished!

Finally, today I got back to the fantasy drawing I've been working on for a while. I've been letting the sketch take me along with it rather than carefully planning out the whole concept before I started. So today I decided at the last minute what exactly would go in the skull's mouth.

First I had to finish around the mouth, this is where I left off last time...

 

Blending the new pen lines in to the old part of the sketch can be a challenge; applying too much pen will change the overall tones of the drawing, so I apply the pen very lightly, allowing me to carefully build up a shade to match the pen already laid down days ago.

 

With the white of the paper showing through in the mouth you can see just how dark the whole image is, which is the effect I wanted, the use of extreme light and dark (chiaroscuro) to create a dramatic form. The writing inside the mouth had been to put a reptile inside the open jaws but I couldn't think how to update this much-used image so I chose another creature...

... a rat. I still wanted to make a reference to something sometimes considered creepy or repugnant, to keep the imagery dark or sinister. The challenge is to create a visible image whilst still maintaining the correct shade values, the rat would be in deep shadow but still needed to be seen.

By creating the deep dark shadow in the mouth surrounding the rat I'm able to determine the shade values of the fur so that the rat is withdrawn from the light but still visible. I decided to leave a sharp highlight in the eyes, I'm sure the focus of the picture will be divided between the skull and the rat in the balance that I'm after.

 

I think the rat head looks good but it's still a little bright and so the focus shifts onto it too easily, it's distracting. It's at this stage I realise I've forgotten the shading in the left cheekbone, doh!

So having shaded in the cheekbone and darkening the rat's head but leaving his eyes sharp with a bright highlight I think I've got the balance right. I'm happy with how the whole image works and I've finally finished!