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.