Kelp Bed Frolick

INSPIRATION: Several old WWII era American cheesecake photos plus the complete catalog and collection of the "Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta," Boris Valejo, Chris Achilleos, Chris Foss and Olivia De Berardinis.

If you don't know who these amazing painters, illustrators, sketch artists and visual creators of erotic mythology, sword & sorcery, pin-up, cheesecake, science fiction and horror are, then Google them and be amazed and inspired. Note: Like me (Living or dead) they all worship or worshipped iconic model Bettie Page within and throughout their portfolios.

CLIENTS: The original founders including Yasuki Hamano of Animation Kobe Organizing Committee's media awards during their earlier publishing enterprise in 1992. The Animation Kobe (Japanese: アニメーション神戸) was an event established by Kobe in 1996 to promote anime and other visual media. The Animation Kobe Awards (アニメーション神戸賞) were given annually until 2015 by Kobe and the Organizing Committee to creators and creations.

AGENT: Kenneth ("Kenji-san") Wehage of Tokyo and Riverside, California whose relatives were major restauranteurs in Boston, Massachusetts.

ABOUT THE ASSIGNMENT: This particular 1992 multimedia render stopped, when my Kobe, Japan-based computer art house client Yasuki Hamano told me to stop. They wanted to texture map and color match the remaining portion of the image in order to affect a . . . "Clutch Cargo" Anime . . . environmental render effect. The mermaid's hand stroked the shark's pectoral fin and sun dapples were digitally inserted along with pebbles and Kelp "gook." At the time, I wanted to finish the hand, but I was ordered to leave it unfinished.

These people were also messing with texture mapping crocodile scale patterns, snake scale patterns, volcanic sand patterns, wet algae patterns, and an assortment of other patterns maintained in actual files for memory storage. This stuff was prehistoric by today's standards. The pay was good and the air fare was a perk and the dinners were insane as were the massage and bath establishments.

They also accomplished profound jellyfish wet tissues and tentacles textures along with rocks covered in barnacles and encrusted with mussels.

BTW: The kelp carpet shark is a fantasy species based upon an Australian Great Barrier Reef "Wobbegong." In real life none exist. The two leopard shark species are Mexican kelp bed local species as is the Garibaldi. The finished art product ended up in a graphic novel-like Japanese Manga book that read from back-to-front and involved a spy tale derailed by an ocean mystery.

My human female model was a French airline flight attendant who enjoyed playing with old-fashioned sheer hose stockings while laying splayed over the edge of my kitchen counter top. She worked for Air France and her roomie who shared the apartment opposite mine (with my then-girlfriend) all of whom were Air France or Lufthansa employees.

Classic 1960s era panty hose gave me the idea for a living algae garment which could be bred and cultivated into mer-folk fish tails like as if trailblazing 1960s designer Mary Quant had grown her creations in a recombinant DNA genetic vat to give the Homo sapiens aquatis and Homo aquaticus people from Atlantis, Mu and Lemuria more thrust per kick in open water.