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I’m doing a whole series of deep sea fish and they’re so truly hideous my mother has christened them “The Bathing Beauties”. That name has stuck for the time being, so I’d like you to meet The Bathing Beauties.

This is my anglerfish. She was mentioned in a post below. Originally she was going to be a one-off, but I enjoyed drawing her so much I drew her some friends based on the Blue Planet program I watched. Also, all of my beauties have an anthopomorphic component. For example, the anglerfish has a lure that lights up on a stalk attached to her head. I turned that into a lightbulb. You could really say she lights up the sea! Ha ha ha! Moving on.

Ah, the gulper eel. Isn’t she lovely, folks? I also mentioned her below, saying she looked like a kite because all she is is a giant head with a mouth that opens like screen doors that have been ripped off their hinges by a tornado, a tail and no middle bits. And because kites have those little bows on their tail for stability or balance (I forget, science class and kite-flying is a long way back for me), I put little bows on her tail. Awwwww. Pretty.

And now the hatchetfish. I know I’m going with a Bathing Beauties theme here, but the damn thing looks like its mother mated with an Orc. It truly was hit with the ugly stick. Whacked repeatedly. As you can see, it has barbs coming out of it, so I made the top and bottom rows arrows, two forks and a dental tool.

I’m now working on a viperfish wearing a sock (hey, it gets cold down at 5,000 feet) and one other, I haven’t decided yet. But there will be five of them and I’m hoping I sell them as a set and not one at a time. I’d like to see them all living together.

I intended to work on my fish painting this weekend, but on Thursday night I got a phone call. Apparently, someone had run an ad in a paper sometime on Wednesday saying, “We’re doing this thing and you should be a part of it. For more information, go to this website!” The ad ran weeks earlier than expected and… there is no website to go to. So my client called me up in a bit of a twitter and I had to spend Saturday taking photos and building Photoshop files and making this website (which I did, thank you very much, banged that sucker out in four hours, I am awesome and great, fear my wrath.) And then Sunday I was meeting with clients early in the day and family members later, so I had exactly zero time to work on my personal stuff. Alas, such is life.

However, last night I was trying to talk to Snorth on the phone, but Blue Planet was on Discovery and they were doing a deep sea segment. The anglerfish I am drawing, he’s a deep sea fish. I LURVES me some deep sea fish. I kept being distracted from whatever we were talking about to say things like, “Whoo, that has to be the ugliest thing I have ever seen. It looks broken.” Here are some of the highlights for me:

This is the gulper eel. It is a head and a tail which hangs down. No middle bits. And its mouth is huge. As you can sorta see from the picture above, his mouth just falls open. He looks like a kite or a poorly made Muppet. But most importantly, his little creepy beady eyes are perched right at the end of his nose, so when he looks at you head-on, he looks like this:

AHHHH! That is the thing of nightmares. A giant mouth that doesn’t even fit on the frame and seems to go on forever, with cold blue eyes that look at you like a bitter spinster librarian who knows you have three books overdue. I need to go scrape this image out of my mind with a plastic knife now.

The creature below would be one of the most terrifying animals ever, except that its blue light-producing photophores (meant to attract prey) reminds me of eighties music videos, specifically Gloria Estefan and Duran Duran.

Their excessive makeup, their blatant use of teal coloring, the fact that they’re WARRIORS, warriors who sing and dance and use synthesizers, but warriors nonetheless. It’s like this horrifying sea creature goes out all day and kills other fish, but then goes home and listens to Bananarama. And while that’s weird, it’s not scary.

Also, there was another creature that I couldn’t find any pictures of, and that was some sort of deep sea worm. It looked like, and I am not exaggerating, a pretty pink phallus wearing a frilly ballroom dancer’s skirt. It would flip its skirts up and gently flop them from side to side and that’s how it would move itself around the ocean floor. You know the saying, “Truth is stranger than fiction”? They ain’t kidding. In my most creative moments, I couldn’t have come up with anything resembling, and I never get tired of typing this phrase, a phallus wearing a frilly ballroom skirt.