For this project, we were to create a minimalist version of an animal of our choosing, I chose a Manta Ray, just because I adore them.
These were the three sketches that I came up with for my Manta Ray, I wanted to mimic the seaweed and/or the movement of the waves that is in the sea and that the manta ray uses to move around gracefully, as well as adding some bubbles in there. I decided to further explore the middle sketch.
These are some quick colour studies that we were told to do. I liked little things about all of them so I decided to combine all of them. I used the bottom one as the base for the seaweed in the background, I used the lighter tones of the head as shown in both the monochrome and the primary colour studies, but I also used more of the toned down blue of the monochrome one as well, rather than the bright blues of the bottom colour study.
This is the final image I came up with! I personally love the negative space of the white around the head, though with hearing critiques from me classmates I learned that it didn't read super well and many people thought that the image was more like a crane or a bird with a thin neck/body. So I think that if I ever did another project like this I would make the negative space even more obvious or I would make it a light grey or blue so that people would have an easier time understanding it.
