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This painting started out as a quick sketch I did on a scrap of paper at work. I liked the composition and continued to refine the sketch into a cleaner drawing. I tried to work out the placement and poses of the Amazon characters so they told a story and fit with the overall movement of the sea monster. I wanted the image to have a fun and cartoony feel, so I kept the character's anatomy simple and stylized. Once I decided that the women would be Amazon warriors I started collecting reference images of ancient Greek armor, weapons and ships and incorporated details from these images in my designs.
At this point I enlarged the cleaned up drawing and drew a much more finished version of the image. It seemed that the sea monster's head did not fit with the style of the human characters so I did a few more designs until I found one that worked. All my drawings where scanned and put together in Photoshop to make up the final outline.
Before starting on the painting I did a color design for the Amazon's outfits and a quick color sketch of the finished drawing. I quickly blocked in the color sketch to roughly work out the lighting direction and the overall color tones of the image. For the design of the sea monster I looked at the colors and patterns of various types of eels and sea snakes. I tried to choose colors that worked with the blue/grey background and did not clash with the red, black and gold I had chosen for the characters.
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