blood belly in progress

This is what I'm basing it on, as you can see its got loads of colour going on and it'll be a real challenge to capture that. I'm only half way through at the moment and I've only worked on the base colours so far but I think that they need to be more luminous. 

blood belly comb jelly Clearest blue

With all the little blooping noises in this song, I thought of the deep sea jellies that have lots of different coloured lights going off to a similar rhythm. To work with the different layers of transparency, Ive tried drawing the lines in three separate sections. Hopefully this will mean I'll have more freedom with it.

Cuttle

I love the final colours of the cuttle fish and while the textured lines didn't line up perfectly I think they work really well. It was also a lot easier as I didn't have to be quite so careful with the overlapping lines. 

I was happy with the background but uploading it now I don't think the colours work together, even if its based on it's actual habit. I think the colour that I had as the background of the first image is a lot better. I should try and play with my colours so that it works together.

Cuttle Fish - The less I know the better

This song made me think of the sneaky cuttle fish in a different episode of life. So I used that as my main reference again. 

I had to improvise a little with the background as it's mainly full of that very fine seaweed that didn't make a very interesting image.

I decided to draw my texture lines separate so I couldn't mess up the drawing but that means that I kind of have to hope they line up right as I didn't have access to a light box at the time. It should be easier to colour the lines like this though.

Pattern

here they are all placed together, ready to go into the pattern. 

This is the final repeat pattern, I added some of the little jellies that I'd drawn before as there was a little gap that I wanted to make full use of. I think it works really well and I'm really happy with it to say it's my first go at a deep sea pattern and I wasn't sure how I was going to make it work. 

Pattern

I found this really hard to colour as it has lots of little different colours but after stressing about it for ages I chose to just do the hints of the one colour in a couple of places. I thought this would work better for the pattern as well because I don't want to overcrowd the colours on it. The other large issue I had with this was that my original line drawing was too spread apart and I had to sketch out another one that had all the little lines close together.  

pattern

This was really simple to colour as it's mainly clear and glowing white. The piece of orange has a gradient to make a lovely natural progression of colour. 

Pattern

This guy was really complicated to draw, or rather to colour. It has a hint of pink and purple but it's only at certain angles and it also has to be somewhat hidden by the blue. I don't think I've managed it this perfectly and I think the yellow might be too bright. However while I'm worried about it not being right, it's a sole lot better than the blue yellow one I did a while ago so I think I'm starting to get a better grip on it. I also used a brush to put a bit more texture on this one and I think that helped to blend it together better.

Pattern

Taking inspiration from that book (and so that I had something to be excited about) I started working on a pattern layout. As I know these can take me a really long time I wanted to use mostly my pre-existing drawings but I drew out the long tentacles again so they could effectively wrap around the image. I also did a little sketch (underneath) to plan out how to make it a repeat pattern. 

Art Forms from the Abyss: Ernst Haeckel's Images from the HMS Challenger Expedition

While at the museum shop I saw this beautiful book that I absolutely had to buy. It makes fantastic reference and while his style is a lot more factual than what I would like to do, his use of space is incredible and makes me want to work on something more like pattern. Or at least something where they fit around each other like this.

Natural History Museum

It was my sisters birthday in mid February So I made the trip down to visit her in London, while there we went to the NAtural History Museum and I found loads of Marine reference. I found this really exciting and inspiring, particularly as you can get a much better sense of scale. I also think I'd like to start introducing some more plant based oddities as well but I'm happy to just focus on bioluminescence for now.

Leafy Together

The colours work well together but I think I'm a little unused to backgrounds. I'm not sure they look like they're together enough, or that the dragons stand out enough. I need to put this into further consideration next time.

I trie to see what it would look like squished as it needs to be a square for the brief and I didn't want to lose any of it but it mainly just looks squished. I'll have to crop the background like I originally intended when I did the large background. 

Leafy sea dragon continued

As it turns out, nearly every reference image I had was of a different colouring. This made choosing its colours extremely difficult. I explored a few that were more yellow/Green but it looked wrong against the blue of its stripes. So I decided to make it a little bit less accurate (but still based on the correct type of colours), This lead to a lovely orangey brown range. Which went a lot better with the blue and yellow.  This took an almost unreasonable amount of time but I'm really happy with their final colouring.

I coloured the background separately but kept placing the dragons against it to make sure that the colours worked well together. Some of the colours I chose for the background are a little different to the reference but I didn't want it to blend into each other too much. If I had the time I'd sort out that patch behind the yellow seaweed in the bottom lefthand corner. I think it looks a little empty right now. 

Secret 7 pins

Follow Rosie's board secret 7 on Pinterest.

Leafy sea dragon - at last

Due to me being quite ill and generally not good with life I wasn't able to work to meet the secret 7 deadline but I'm going to still use the brief. I started with leafy sea dragons doing a courtship dance for the song At Last. I want to keep a Marine theme for all 7 and this song made me think of lovers.

I used footage from the BBC documentary Life as my reference. As well as the Pin board I made.

I used these to get the main idea for the background and the movement they make in the dance. Then the other defence for the details I couldn't make out properly.

Blue yellow fish

I made this one and I think it's the worst one so Far. Something about it is wrong.  I don't think I've managed to capture the glow correctly, particularly on the yellow in the fins. The insides are also not quite right, the highlights helped but I think the colours need to transition better.

Bioluminescent

http://laughingsquid.com/the-dino-pet-a-toy-dinosaur-that-comes-to-life-with-bioluminescent-dinoflagellates/?utm_content=buffer3e86b&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

While searching for deep sea creatures to draw on Pinterest I came across this toy/pet that has been filled with a type of algae that emit the same kind of bioluminesence that many deep sea creatures do. If  I had the time (and the skill) I'd like to make my own range of this, I think this would work really well with different types of deep sea fish instead of the dinosaur.   

http://www.instructables.com/id/Grow-Your-Own-Bioluminescent-Algae/

I also found this link that shows you how to grow them yourself at home. I would really love too do this but I don't know how I could actually make the container and I'd like to do it properly, which would mean a lot of complications. If I could collaborate with someone who could make it then I would  do it immediately.

Hat

Boy had gotten a Magna doodle drawing board for christmas and I ended up doodling a lot on it. I quite liked this weird little alien guy so I decided to use him for my illustration fir day as I can use that for more fun, random things.

This was really fun and I liked doing a small thing just to make myself happier.