Hi everyone! 😊

I'm happy to show you this illustration that I made. It is a drawing that I made for the character design challenge. The theme of the month was food animal and as usual, when the challenge involves animals, I'm not so far!

In fact, I only entered the animal theme. I should be brave and go for the human subjects :D

Process

Mixing a snake with a sushi seemed like a great idea for the theme. I wanted it to look impressive, the snake being a frightening but fascinating animal.

First I took some time to find a good composition. Initially, I wanted a view like the one on the left, where the snake is hunting for the mouse, but that wouldn't make the sushi stand out.
So I went with the composition on the right, but the position of the snake didn't satisfy me and didn't look natural.

Then I changed that and after some work I found a pose I liked.
Once the sketch was done, I had to come up with a colour scheme. I already knew that I wanted to do an illustration in the style of a Japanese woodblock print - it worked well with the sushi snake theme - so I chose rather soft colours, quite sepia.

Then I had to think about the lighting and effects.

So I painted the algae skin with hatches in the same colour as the line, and had a hatch light in it. For the green torso, I wanted it to be reminiscent of wasabi, but it's not obvious, so I thought of it as a detail; some would see it and some wouldn't, but that's not a problem, it's not the main subject in the painting.

Finally, I made several corrections to the whole painting. At the very end I thought that the top right of the painting was rather empty. So I started thinking about a graphic solution; at first I thought about Japanese characters, but I'm not a connoisseur lol.
So I just thought of the Japanese red sun - which I integrated softly with less opacity and some gradient.

And here is the result! 😊

I hope you will like it.

Don't hesitate to tell me what do you think of it in the comments section.

See you soon for more creations! 😊