Angler Fish Cornhole Board Part 3

        After narrowing down all the thumbnail sketches in my last post, I ended up picking this one:

It's pretty rough, but I thought it was probably the clearest composition out of the bunch.

        I then had to come up with some actual angler fish designs. I really didn't know how I wanted him (actually a her, the males are tiny) to look. So I brought up a few reference images of different types of angler fish, and just kind of selected my favorite features from all of them. These are a few of the designs I came up with.

And this one was my favorite. I guess I liked the teeth or something.

         After I had the design, I built a little reference model or maquette (?) or whatever you want to call it. A fish out of Sculpey.

wooden stand, aluminum wire, aluminum foil, and sculpey

         I bought A wooden dowel and a block of wood from the hardware store, put them together and made a stand. Made a wire armature/ fish skeleton out of aluminum wire. Covered the wire with tin foil to bulk it out some. Glued all of that together with Two Part Epoxy. Got out the Sculpey and started sculpting.

Covering the foil with Sculpey.

And after a day or two of randomly working on it, It was ready to be cooked.

         I had to turn it sideways in the oven because it was too big. I shouldn't have made it so big, but I really had no idea what I was doing. If I did it again I would... still have no idea.


After it cooled down I just covered it in brown and white acrylic paint.

Finished.

In the next post I'll show you some of the experiment/ practice paintings.

Angler Fish Cornhole Board part 2

In the last post i said I'd give you some of the process of how I painted an angler fish on a cornhole board; This is pretty much how it happened...

The job was to do one board with an angler fish, and one with an octopus.

I started out with lots of small thumbnail sketches, just to try and come up with some ideas. I thought it would be cool if the two boards made one picture but could also serve as separate paintings... So I was kind of exploring an idea of an ancient abandoned underwater city where a giant angler fish and a giant octopus would meet or something, or a sunken ship, i really didn't know.

A few of the initial thumbnail sketches, they're all only a few inches tall.

so after doing a few of these I showed them to my client, and she didn't like any of them lol. She suggested that I keep it simple and just do an angler fish with his lure/light as the hole and the octopus reaching around the hole (I haven't done the octopus board yet) and not do the whole "one big picture thing."

After doing these sketches I found that I'm very slow at drawing. It takes me a long time to come up with something I'm not looking at it. I figured some research would help too, and that's when I decided to work on the angler fish and forget about the octopus for awhile. 

So after a few deep sea documentaries, angler fish anatomy charts and wikipedia pages, I made a tiny model to help me a little. 

He was only about two inches long. I used Sculpey and Toothpicks and a little wire.

With the new direction in mind I did some more studies/thumbnails. I feel like this part took me way too long. Someone with more experience would have breezed through all of this in a day or two, but by the end of this part I was already about a month in. I was trying to think about how the fish would look, what the lighting would be, how it would look on the board etc. all that stuff. 

A few of the thumbnail sketches, studies and ideas. 

In Part Three I'll talk about which thumbnail i chose, drawing the final fish designs and building the angler fish reference model.

Angler Fish Cornhole Board part 1

This is the first of two cornhole boards i was asked to design and paint.

I painted it in oil, which for me was a huge deal. Well actually, the entire thing was a huge deal for me. I'm completely new to oil painting (but painting in general too), color, drawing, just everything really. So it took a few frustrating months to actually call it done...

The finished painting on a standard cornhole board (2 x 4 ft. plywood board.)

In the next few posts I'll show a few of the steps I took to finish it.

Rough sketches, drafts, paintings, paint, and a reference model.

First Post! (fallen tree)

Welcome people!
This is my first blog post.

2B pencil in Moleskine Sketchbook

My name is Daniel New.

I'll probably be posting some art stuff, music stuff, adventures me and my wife will have, and who knows.

To start off, here's a drawing I did of a tree that fell down in my backyard.