After re-watching Iron Lung, I wanted to draw Ellie the blood eel.
I started with a basic sketch of layout. I knew I wanted to showcase her tail details and open maw, and that I wanted a decent amount of vignette.
I followed it up with some base colors and a large brush. I started to define the limbs on the tail, and applied basic shapes for the skulls, gills, and spines that hadn’t been there before.
I went in with a smaller brush to refine those shapes and rework the maw. I struggled a decent amount with the throat especially, as I found the anatomy confusing and no reference images existed in the same position, but I ended up somewhere I was satisfied.
Next I started on lighting, pushing highs on the face, separating the gill tendrils from the background, separating the teeth from the inside of the mouth, and generally pushing the emphasis towards the face of the eel. I consider this to be one of the final results, as it shows the details better than the following version.
Finally, I put the eel into the blood ocean. I used a few lighting layers to get an overall color that I liked, while furthering the lighting scheme I had come up with. I also edited a png of a piece of steak to use the marbling for the refracted light across the head and body of the eel. I thought this would be a cute easter egg if you look closely. I added a slight grain to be reminiscent of the primary way we see the eel throughout the film – through a low quality x-ray camera. I made a few small tweaks to make sure we didn’t loose the limbs along the tail, and to push the gill tendrils back a little, since they were drawing more attention that I liked with the amount of light they were getting. I am quite happy with the result.
The whole thing took about two hours, and was a good quick exercise and first piece of fanart in a while. It was nice to work on a drawing with no larger project surrounding it.
Below is the tumblr post I made after finishing the project.