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.