I’ve always been in love with the ocean. And lakes. And rivers. Honestly, I’m just a huge fan of the water and anything that lives beneath the water’s surface. I think fish might even be one of my favorite things to doodle.
I just finished up the first season of Fallout on Prime Video and I noticed this amazing fish wallpaper in one of the abodes of Vault 4. Which was totally appropriate because the general vibe of Vault 4 is that there’s something fishy going on.
Someday I’ll work on something more abstract, but seeing these fish got me feeling fishy doodly, so I opened up Procreate and got to doodling.
PHOTO CREDIT: Amazon MGM Studios
I tried a crab friend too
PHOTO CREDIT: Cartoon Network
What Finn says next has always tickled me in so many ways, though.
“Something’s been bubbling up inside me. I Really wanna say it out loud but I’ve been embarrassed. Okay. Are crabs robots? In what way isn’t a crab a robot? I guess I understand that BMO is not a Crab. But I don’t understand why BMO’s not a crab.”
It’s definitely the weird sort of thought I might have found myself dwelling on as a kid his age. I did ponder similar things, especially trees and immune systems. There was a beautiful naive moment in sixth grade where I was genuinely flummoxed that immune systems weren’t transplantable organs.
From crabs to cancer to immune systems
My third grade teacher died of skin cancer when I was in fifth grade. My fifth grade teacher decided it would be a good idea for all of us to read a book where a character grapples with her sister’s cancer.
It wasn’t super helpful without someone explaining some of the medical context to a kid like me. And it was especially unhelpful to have a children’s book dance around the issue of how cancer affects the immune system. For the sake of scientific accuracy. Which was important to me as a kid.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Lois Lowry, and A Summer To Die was a phenomenal book. It may have been unhelpful in explaining cancer and immune systems to me in an accurate way. But it did give me the courage to think about things that were otherwise kind of dark. Which I needed at the time.
Genuinely, Lowry’s books helped me grapple with the emotions of tough events as a kid. They didn’t really explain socialism or Nazism or cancer for shit. But they helped me with the emotional pieces of grappling with tough stuff.
Cover: A Summer To Die by Lois Lowry
The loss of my teacher and reading that book had occurred during a period of time when schools made a huge deal about HIV and AIDS awareness. We were getting Hepatitis B vaccines soon, too. And transplanted organs were talked about a lot in the news.
So without accurate explanations, my little eleven year old brain thought it should be simple, right? Just give AIDS and cancer patients new immune systems.
I still cringe about that sometimes. Not because of my own mistake about how “simple” it should be to cure AIDS and cancer. I cringe about how unwilling adults were to talk about these tough things. Which ultimately caused me more anxiety than relief.
Back to the fish
Anyway. This is a lot of talk about cancer, disease, and crabs for a post about a cute little fish. But I can’t really imagine fish without also thinking about crabs. And the crab sign is Cancer. You see where these connections are going.
At some point I’ll unshelve my cute little crab companion and make a new attempt.
Oh. The fish! I decided to use a different color palette for this little fish and play with colors and contrast and shapes to texture his scales and fins. Ultimately I was unhappy with the harsh blue / orange contrast and decided to gently hue all of the blues but the outline with a pale coral color.
I made at least seven types of kelp backgrounds before settling on what you see here. There had been bubbles at one point too, but I decided that they didn’t add anything and took them out.
I am really satisfied with the way this fish turned out. Minimalism in the background was definitely the way to go. There’s still some wonkiness in the scales that I might revisit. But overall, I’m happy.
I really do think that one of my greatest strengths as a person comes down to wanting and being able to relate to anything that can live in dark, unfamiliar, and hostile places. And drawing the creatures that live in water, where I can’t breathe, allows me to imagine life in a world where things are livable even if they’re different.
Which I guess is a way of me saying that fish give me hope. Hope that no matter how hostile or unfamiliar the environment, I’ll find friends and a way to live and be happy.
