"FISHBOWL"

This 2015 illustration began as a sketch-a-doodle for me at work on a very boring and really bad day. This was my idea of a well-earned "Smoke Break." For over a week I continued to work on it and overdraw on it and then to ink and shade it. Photoshop tinting and colorization completed the look.

The materials I used were office supplies, ball point pens, assorted office pens, Berol Prismacolors, markers and I then hard lined in India ink. The Hydran Medusoid pirate's Coppery-metallic tints were applied in Photoshop.

I liked the finished render so well that over the next three years I wrote an unpublished novel called "Fishbowl." The final draft of the book is done except for one final overall edit. It became the telling of the story of how a narcotics smuggler who was a revered dairy farm foreman and family man from Coolidge, Arizona and who was bound by blood to the Sinaloa Cartel found himself abducted by aliens on a road trip; who were in turn abducted by a Medusoid alien pilot from a system in the Constellation of Hydra.

Along with the well-practiced dope smuggler's beloved black F-350 truck.

And the story continued as to how he (The dope dealer) kept his head but lost his body to the alien carnivore pilot's butcher's locker. As the author, I expressed my sorry-ass protagonist's first-person thoughts and utterly panicked impressions en-Espaniol--go figure!--I'm as white as the belly of a dead catfish! It took me three years to put all my novel's elements together. And it all began as an office sketch.

And of how he lost his life but saved his immortal human soul while finding the soul-group of his entire family courtesy of and at the hands of a human bounty hunter trailing this Medusoid accompanied by the bounty hunter's three chimpanzee flight crew members operating inside their own 25,000 year old ancient astronaut starcutter.