For Junefairytale Day 19, today is the seahorse's turn.
For this day, I decided to make the seahorse with colorful dots swimming at the bottom of the sea
Seahorse are of the genus Hippocampus, from the Ancient Greek, hippos meaning "horse" and kampos meaning "sea monster". Seahorses are not great swimmers so they spend a lot of time with their tail wrapped around stationery objects.
I decided to illustrated a picture of @justinhofman published in Sept 19 of 2017 in @natgeo about the pollution and how animals are suffering for our ways of using plastic. This seahorse was captured in the waters of Sumbawa Besar, Indonesia. “The art of pollution”.
Been some time since I touched the pencil. It wasn't easy to get back to drawing, since I was also distracted by the internet for some time. Lots of things went through my head, while I was out on a trip. Just drew whatever I felt like drawing, and this came alongside some reflections:
I have been stuck on fixing this character concept for a very long time, trying to box it within a classification. Bird, wyvern, dragon, shadow, whatever- I came to a point today, where I felt that it really doesn't matter anymore. This is that sort of character who can be everything.
I spent the entire afternoon trying to arrange all the little ideas and features, following true to creative intuition. Smashing together many of my previous character designs, this appeared. A masked and unnamed figure (???) with traits from many of my previous works.
An avian / draconic / spiritual shapeshifter has always been something with me all this time, even when I tried to create a sona years back (finding it meaningless). True to its nature, it has few lively features except its eyes and requires a mask to display additional signs of life.
Its clear that this character is basically a symbolic self-expression. It wasn't easy to seperate myself from my introjective tendencies, which easily distorts my concept of this figure (took weeks to untangle). Once the confusions loosen, it reappears with noticeably familiar features.
The scribble above still has some room for rearrangement, just limited by the irreversible nature of pencil drawing. The grey markings were too dark, and the feet might look better staying white. The pale golden underbody markings, were actually a surprise.