Inktober 52 - 2021 22
A bunch of water-themed prompts that year, and this one is kinda difficult, honestly. Maybe I've been to the wrong swimming pools, but I have trouble finding a pleasing frame for a swimming pool. For a while I played with the idea of capturing the moment a header makes contact with the water or one of these sports movie action shots, but it turns out, I don't actually know how that's supposed to look, and I wasn't going to use reference. I've also been on a track of avoiding the literal prompt, so that's what I ended up doing on this one as well.
Unfortunately, swimming pools aren't usually subject of many rhetorical flourishes, so going with very creative routes wasn't really an option, I think. For personal history reasons though, I do associate frogs as something to watch out for around swimming pools, so maybe I could illustrate something a frog could use as a swimming pool, allthewhile avoiding having to draw the pool.
It rains a lot where I live - or at least it used to - and when it did, flower pots had the tendency to fill up with water that would stay there for a while after the rain subsided. A small to moderately sized frog could probably swim in one of those without feeling greatly crammed into it. That could be framed by some plants to make a pretty scene, I suppose.
The hardest thing about this sketch was getting the pot to look like it had a rim. I don't know how that ended up taking so many attempts, but afterwards, it was more or less smooth sailing. The frog sitting on the rim was constructed with an oval for the body and a circle for the head, connected by way of tracing the spinal cord with a line. The flowers and leaves around the center-piece were partially drawn with references, though I don't know how many of these are native to the regions where frogs live, or to each others' habitat, but this was just supposed to be pretty.
Line-art was simple and clean for this one. I didn't want to add shadows the way I've been doing for a while now, because it makes the environments seem a little hostile or empty, neither of which is the impression I'm going for here. However, without either the entire page full of plants, or at least some mood-shading, I think this looks a little unfinished. I also smeared some ink on the frog on accident. Either way, this one was difficult to conceptualize, and I'm not sure what to make of the result. I'll leave it this way, and just hope the next prompt is a little easier to illustrate.