Iruka - 2003


There's a bit of a story behind this artwork. At first, I was drawing a dragon character I've been working on for about a year. The dragon needed a companion, and originally I considered an orca. However, I wanted this to be more "personal" and felt that a bottlenose dolphin's size would be better suited to the picture. (This is only the second bottlenose artwork I've ever done. Usually I think they're kind of snotty animals, heh.)

So the dolphin was originally swimming with the dragon. I felt the need to make the dolphin "special" and so gave him a tattoo and named him Iruka. (Hey, if a dolphin lives on a world with dragons, they can have a tattoo.) The dragon, however, didn't work out quite right, so I'm dropping itfor now. But I liked Iruka so much that I decided to give a go at drawing him by himself.

I'm practicing with Prismacolors some more, and this is one of those practices. I can't stay I'm entirely happy with it. I've never been really good with using color in art, and I'm frustrated with this one. I wanted more blues in there to give the appearance of being underwater, but it all looked funky. The dolphin ended up being more of the typical grey/brownish dolphinny color.

Oh, and Iruka just means dolphin in Japanese. I'm quite unoriginal. =)