Octopus Ink

Cartoon style drawings don't come easily for me, but I'm working on it. It's a matter of practice; knowing what features to exaggerate, knowing how to inject charisma and cuteness into a character. In a sense, scientific illustration is easier in that it requires less activity from the creativity brain part.

I've had a hard time with cartoon sharks before. One of the difficulties is figuring out where to bend the head forward in a manner that is completely unnatural to a real shark but mimics the way a human head faces forward atop a vertical body. The anthropomorphizing helps with the likability of the shark character. Also, people are used to recognizing sharks from their profile (everyone knows what a shark fin looks like), or from a gaping teeth-filled mouth, a la Jaws. Here I wanted a front view, so that this shark could show off what I need to illustrate for an Aquarium birthday party activity: the fact that sharks have many rows of teeth. I was tempted to have a look at Finding Nemo or Shark Tale frames, to see how those artists had tackled these specific problems, but I decided not to, because I didn't want my style to be too influenced, and well, because it's a more effective experience to figure these things out for myself.

For a while, my sketches of sharks looked like whales with pointy teeth. Then I figured the pointy shark "nose" was really integral to defining a shark, and I moved the eye so that it was slightly over the mouth, rather past the end of the mouth (which is where whale eyes tend to be). Emphasizing the big mouth also helped. More shark cartoons to come...