Four Water Creatures

I drew these in pencil, just a simple line drawing, over a year ago. I don’t recall why - they were for a project of some kind. I loved how the four creatures fit together on the page, particularly the frog. I found them again a few weeks ago and decided to ink and finish them in color pencils. The image above is the final result. The image below is a bit more than half done, showing the simple ink lines that were done over the pencil before adding the color.

I love fancy guppies; they’re a color-sweet-tooth’s dream. I enjoyed looking at hundreds of photos of them before creating the color schemes for these two. I decided to brush black ink into the entire background to make the colors pop, as in some of the best guppy photos. Final move was to put some blue pencil over the black of the background, to cool and push it back somewhat.

Image size 13 1/4 x 16 3/4 inches - Speedball liquid ink, Micron pen, and colored pencils (Prismacolors, Verithins and Faber Castell Polychromes). Listening to The Wailin’ Jennys, Paloma Faith, Halestorm, Chairlift, Jukebox the Ghost, Kathy Mattea, Indigo Girls, The New Pornographers, Tripp, Prince, The Bangles, Browneyed Girls, The Shins, Carla Sciaky, Dar Williams, The Weepies, John Gorka, Jump Little Children, John Mayer, Chris Smither, Cake, Renee Olstead, MAE, Van Halen, Molly Hatchet, Sylvain Cossette, Tom Petty, Joan Jett, Buena Fe, Descemer Bueno, Ivan Lins, Shawn Colvin, Del Amitri, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Brooks Williams, Stranger Spirits, Guster, The Summer Obsession, White Sea, ZZ Top, Billy Joel, The Outfield, Suzy Boggus, P!nk, Ringo Starr, Suzanne Vega…