I fiddled with this idea about an octopus attacking a guy underwater for a long time.  I finally decided to try it out on one of the long pieces of wood I bought a few weeks ago.  First though, I took all the sketches from my sketchbook and tried to combine them and bring in some other elements.  I did initial sketches on layers of transparency paper.

After toying with that enough I decided to make a more serious drawing on actual paper. The dark box on the left is just the shadow from the camera.

next, it was time to grid the wood and sketch there…

So here I have a lot of the main elements getting fleshed out.  It looks very cartooney, but in a way maybe that would have been more appropriate.  I decided it didn’t look right and tried outlining everything with ebony pencil, which was a huge mistake:

But, I tried to pull it back together by getting out the teeny tiny brush and putting in details (more contrast on the body, bubbles, details on the tanks, light, etc.)

I might go back and fix the jellyfish… as they don’t really look right.  It is hard to see the detail in the above photo, so I took a detail photo and another detail photo of the original sketch, to compare:

Although it looks more alive in close-up, the piece is somewhat dull in person.  I think part of it stems from my overuse (or just the use at all) of the ebony pencils. In my head I wanted this to be sort of like one of Julian Callos’ wood pieces, but it didn’t work out that way.