We all have our Big Fish stories……What’s yours?
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A few months back, I received a random inquiry about my Stream of Consciousness painting.
The inquiry was from the publisher John Wiley & Sons Canada. They were interested in licensing my painting for use in their educational textbook Visualizing Psychology Canadian Edition with an initial run of 16,000 books for students across Canada.
After a back and forth, the deal was inked. I got the painting professionally photographed and sent the big old 300 DPI Tiff file via YouSendIt.
One of the things I negotiated was to receive a copy of the book and low behold last week it arrived in all its glory.
My painting is on page 122 and 123 and heads up Chapter 5 which is called States of Consciousness.
I’m stoked!
…..
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“This shark, swallow you whole. Little shakin’, little tenderizin’, an’ down you go.” ~ Robert Shaw as Quint in Jaws(1975)
Alright enough of that. Really, I just wanted to convey the bad boy allure of this apex predator with the imprint of my Simian Style rather than reinforce the stereotypical idea of the malicious man-eating shark. This stereotype has been terribly harmful to sharks which by some estimates are dwindling in number at a rate of 100 MILLION per year killed as a result of human fishing and also deliberate shark fining.
Shark fining, for those of you who don’t know, often involves catching a shark, removing it’s fins and disposing of it’s carcass overboard to slowly drown. The fins are used to prepare the Asian delicacy of shark fin soup and sadly that’s where the money is. Sharks are a majestic creature and they deserve our respect and awe not to be inhumanely savaged, mutilated, and killed for their fins.
Some of you may remember that a while back I posted a logo I designed for a fantastic organization called Iemanya Oceanica which seeks to preserve sharks and rays. They have numerous great programs ranging from “adopting” your very own shark to scholarships and educational outreach. I encourage you to check them out to further educate yourself on the predicament of sharks worldwide.
Finally, I found this great video called the “Death of a Deity” by Joe Romeiro of 333 productions which does a superb job portraying how incredible sharks are, how vital they are to the ecosystem of coral reefs, the inhumanity of shark fining and also the degree to which generally human activity is damaging sharks and the ocean at large.
More Jay Zuck Oceanica:
“So we sailed on to the sun,
Till we found the sea of green,
And we lived beneath the waves,
In our yellow submarine”
~ The Beatles
Sometimes 960 pixels is just not enough to tell the story of my sketch. To tell my tale today, I am trying something brand new. I am going to narrate portions of zoomed and cropped pieces of my layout which may necessitate you clicking on the images for an enlarged version to get the full effect. Anyway, off we go.
Under the sea lies a fast food “dive” thru for submarines. It is called the Frog Shaq and is operated by a trio of frogs who are sure to give your food the extra special attention it deserves. There secret is a distinctive lick of the tongue to add that aquatic flavor, but shhhh don’t tell anybody.
Their customers today are manning a two man submersible complete with robotic arms. The eager captain can not wait to get his fast food fix and his stoner lackey and second mate looks on intently to get his munchie groove on. While designing these two characters, I was contemplating a Skipper and Gilligan like duo.
When drawing the submarine itself, I was also thinking a little bit of the vehicle James Cameron used in his various underwater documentaries with a little bit of a cartoony spin.
A school of fish, a hammerhead shark, and an opportunistic eel help create the underwater scene, but my favorite addition is the little crab brandishing it claws in the direction of the larger sub as if to mock its mechanical analog. The fancy shmancy servo motor powered manipulating arms have nothing on him or at least that’s what he thinks.
The layout sketch is still a bit rough and I am going to give it another pass before I consider it complete. So, now in addition to a final pirates layout you now have an undersea drive thru layout sketch hopefully to look forward to. Keep your eyes peeled as they will be coming soon.
I designed this logo for a fantastic organization called Iemanya Oceanica. It was intended to be used for a promotional material Iemanya was sending to some of their generous lawyer friends and donors. It was actually my Dad’s idea to riff on the concept of a lawyer as a shark. I thought the idea was pretty funny and it made for an interesting logo.
Iemanya is a non-profit organization dedicated to the conservation of sharks and rays and their habitats. Iemanya supports research, provides environmental education, and promotes sensible environmental policy.
It really frightened me to learn that possibly as many as 100 million sharks are killed in a given year. Many of them have their fins lopped off and are brutally thrown back in the ocean to die all of the sake of shark fin soup.
The numbers are staggering and there are many good reasons to preserve this apex predator. Don’t buy the hype portraying sharks as mindless and viscious maneaters and if you are feeling particularly ambitious I encourage you to adopt-a-shark today.
“From the living fountain of instinct flows everything that is creative; hence the unconscious is not merely conditioned by history, but is the very source of the creative impulse. It is like Nature herself – prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation.” ~ Carl Jung
“There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
These sketches of various fish were done on black paper with white and colored pencils. It is a nice change of pace to sketch on black paper. It is like you are poking light in the darkness.