Illustration Friday - Sea

I am posting this entry quite late, later than usual anyway.

I have been pretty busy with getting ready to move house but the main reason for not finishing something earlier is that the topic is just too huge.

Sea creatures are some of my favourite subjects so I could think of a million things to paint and none of them seemed right.

I adore the sea - it fascinates me. I love seeing the different colours and moods, snorkelling and swimming and spying on fish.

I could spend hours beachcombing and rock pooling; collecting shells and looking for interesting items washed up from far away places.

As a child in Scotland there always seemed to be brown jelly fish , almost the size of dustbin lids, washed up on the beach.

Shore crabs, bright red sea squirts , limpets and barnacles covered the rocks. Masses of blue-grey mussels and brown and green sea weed and bladder wrack, with its strange bubble like leaf structures, would cover the shore when the tide went out.

I once found a small puffer fish - it must have been caught up in the Gulf Stream, as they are usually found in much more southern , and warmer , water.

My dad was king of the beachcombers in our family - he always seemd to find the most amazing things. Once he found a goblet that turned out to have been from a Spanish Armada shipwreck - he donated it to the museum.

I sketched some mermaids purses, some sharks, some comic fish and even a salt water crocodile but somehow i couldn't decide what to do for the topic.

I ended up trying to do something more abstract trying to convey something about the sea and its myths ; the silken hair of mermaids, diving whales and dolphins, tentacles of octopus and sea monsters, the sleek shapes of the albatross and diving birds, the foam and waves and patterns of the water , the tides and currents and ever changing colours: the Sea.




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