ok, wow its been awhile since i've submitted, been really busy with class and been doing 3d modeling so that's a lil hard to show on DA. heres the creative project i had for my Art History 1 class. we had to take a piece of art, anything artistic from the time periods were went over and take inspiration from it and create our own artwork from anything that motivated us from our object. I chose the Terracotta hydria: kalpis (water jar) http://www.metmuseum.org/Collection.....ions/130011622

In my artwork for this creative project I recreated the Hippocamp shown in much of Greek art. I looked at all different types of fish and drew up some sketches of ones i was considering. My plan was to recreate the Hippocamp with the designs of real, living breathing fish today. I chose to base my scene on the coral reef so of course there were to be many colourful fish to chose from. I originally planned to make a scene with many different redesigned Hippocamp swimming and floating in various poses. Unfortunately time wasn’t quite on my side so I decided to change it up a bit. I changed the idea for
multiple Hippocamp to a more narrowed down number of just two. I staged the scene of them fighting against each other as if defending their turf, like horses and fish do themselves. I tried to base the action and personalities of both the two fish I used and the personality of horses to create the picture and emotion. I wanted the two fish, or Hippocamp, to be in contrast to each other so I chose a wonderfully colourful fish design against a smoother more light coloured fish design. I also wanted to tell the story of the colourful fish, based on the psychedelic, less agressive Mandarin fish, defending his home from the lighter fish, based on the venomous, super aggressive Lionfish. I chose
the Mandarin fish because of it being such a complete opposite of the Lionfish. My plan had always included the Lionfish so I needed a positive to flow against the negative. Overall the hardest and most time took making this project was all the in the detail in both fish design and to also colour the Mandarin.

-sketched with mechanical pencil and inked with Micro pens and then scanned in and coloured in Photoshop cs4.

photos of the original Mandarin fish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarinfish
photos of the original Lionfish: http://www.neaq.org/animals_and_exh.....fish/index.php

p.s.- Did you know the Mandarin fish is one of the few fish species that has no scales??? instead they are covered in mucus-like film :3

Artwork and Character Design belongs to me, Maszeattack
Background image belongs to respective owners.