Underwater Creature assignment

Underwater Creature assignment

Before even starting with any concepts or designs for my underwater creature I decided to do a quick photo study of a shark to get the feel of drawing underwater scenes. Photo studies are something I have been into recently, especially after the summer when at one point I was trying to do a photo study a day for awhile. My goal wasn't to have finished pieces, but practice my painting techniques and knowledge about lighting and colour. 

After spending about an hour on the shark photo study I decided to try doing some silhouettes. At this point I had no ideas in mind so I just drew shapes with fins that could remotely resemble and pass as sea creatures. 

I wasn't sure about any of those, none of them really appealed to me to take and finish them so I felt a bit stuck. I took a break by drawing a tiny fish.  

 

The tiny fish reminded me of something I drew awhile back,another orange fish.

Since the silhouettes didn't really work for me this time, I decided to just do some sketches instead. I tried a fish with spikes, fish in a suit, a random manta ray, something like a shark and then another creature which was inspired by Japanese mythology, half monkey, half fish. 

I quite liked the Japanese fish monkey, but I realized that would be hard to make. So I took the next one in line which was the mermaid shark man. I attempted to do a base mesh in Maya, I thought I could quickly model and pose him for a paintover. But I didn't really have the skills to do that yet. It was taking too long and I didn't feel confident enough in the results I was getting so I left it alone.

I quite liked my original sketch so I just took it and painted it. While doing that I kept referring to the photo study I did earlier to make sure I was using the right colours. I think doing something similar to my photo study was a good choice since it was such a nice reference. 

I learned a lot from this exercise, mainly about colour and light. It makes me want to draw more underwater scenes. Perhaps a 'landscape' next time.