Deep Sea Monsters

This blog is usually about art that I'm currently working, but recently I've been feeling the urge to post about some old pieces I've made.  And since it's my blog, I am going to follow that urge.  

This was one of my favorite projects from my Drawing II class.  Our assignment was to create a book with at least twelve pages of illustration (I think).  And that was the extent of the instructions.  So basically we could do whatever we wanted!  Which means I went through a very prolonged sketching period:

This sketch on the right can be explained by the fact that I was playing Limbo at the time^^^.

After mulling over ideas for way too long, I finally chose a theme: Deep Sea Creatures.  I did a lot of research on deep sea organisms and tried my best to find the creepiest ones. (The "Deep Ocean" episode of Planet Earth and "The Deep" episode of Blue Planet were very inspiring, and awesome!)  Also, as you can probably guess, there aren't many great full shots of these animals, since their bodies collapse if they're taken out of their high pressure environments, so for some of these I would reference multiple pictures of one animal and just kind of put the pieces together in my drawing.  Here are some of the pictures I referenced:

While I was searching the web, I found THIS, one of the most terrifying things you will ever see in your entire life.  WHY DOES THIS EXIST.

Anyway, another challenging aspect of this project was the actual process of making the book - which I waited until the last second to think about.  I made my pages out of black construction paper, and my shoddy craftsmanship led me to punch holes through them with thumb tacks and use dental floss as the binding:

Yes, it fell a part on me while I was presenting it in class.

(As for the rest of the materials, I just used white charcoal pencil and color pencils for the drawing, and I cut millions of tiny circles out of transparent vellum paper for the jellyfish's body.)

And finally, the story follows the life of a lil' cnidarian through the deep sea, and all of the terrifying things he encounters.  I originally tried to write some lines for the book, but since I am the worst writer in the world, I gave up on that very quickly.  I like how it turned out, though.  I think everyone should challenge themselves and try to explain a story only through pictures.  

• Side note: I actually had a page in between each of these drawings that showed the jellyfish swimming away in different directions, but I didn't want to take pictures of all of them.  So try to imagine them.

Hope you like it!

I know you are all thinking it: Troll Dad Eel