Sketchbook Vorgus: Hypnotic Octopus in Kelp

Hey everyone! This is one of the first pieces I've done in a while and I thought it would be neat to show the process I went through to create it. Below is the Hypnotic Octopus. It lures in prey by waving its tentacles arms in mesmerizing patterns. This particular one is within a kelp forest surrounded by plenty of tropical fish.

The end result! Hypnotic.

It begins with an idea - a vision! Then I try to scribble it down at a pretty small scale so that I can work through my vision and see what works and what doesn't, and also so that I don't forget about it.

I tried different backgrounds and swirling patters for the tentacles.

Next, I draw a larger version of the thumbnail. I try to think about the value ranges and the placement of various things in the image. I'm also thinking about how I'm going to go about creating it full scale.

The vision is becoming clearer - also trying to draw kelp.

The fish I had been drawing from memory were... terrible. It was clear I needed to get some reference and practice drawing and imagining tropical fish from various angles. The scribbles all over the page are courtesy of my lovely 2 year old daughter.

Fish are actually pretty fun to draw, once you get the hang of it.

Here are a few of the photos I used for reference when putting together my larger thumbnails and when working on my large rough sketch. Tropical fish, octopus, and kelp!

I needed to figure out what colours I wanted everything to be so I spent some time colouring in some small versions of what I was looking for. Blue and greens, and something bright for the octopus.

Trying out different copic markers for the background and kelp.

After all the preparation I was ready to create a rough sketch - and I mean super rough. Below is the foundation for which I built the rest of my drawing. The extending lines guided the perspective of the fish I drew in a bit later.

Looks messy, but I knew where I needed to go.

I took this rough sketch with guidelines and cleaned it up - after adding some fish. The end result was a rough outline of what I wanted my drawing to be. At this point I printed out my rough sketch and laid it under my final piece of paper. The copic paper I used was pretty thin and easy to see through so I was able to use my rough sketch as a guide to create my linework. Below is the scanned result.

Linework for my Hypnotic Octopus drawing.

At this point all I had to was colour it in! I used a variety of copic markers and did a couple more colour tests to figure out what colours I wanted the fish to be. Below is final piece!