Some Tips for Drawing a Calquarium Cover
by Grant Gussie, CAS
an updated reprint from the The Calquarium Volume 39, Number 8, 1997
If you are like me, you've been a little reluctant lately to submit a cover for The Calquarium because you've been intimidated by the outstanding quality of The Calquarium's cover art over the last few years. Well, so we aren't all as talented as Earle Shim and Ian Lees, but we can not exactly rely on them to supply art all of the time now, can we? Witness the March 1997 issue, when our esteemed editors resorted to (gasp!) USING A NON-CAS DRAWING FOR THE CALQUARIUM COVER!! (Bad Editors, Bad!!) So anyway, in order to help spare The Calquarium such shame in the future, I decided to put pen to paper and come up with a few prospective covers of my own. I would also like to encourage others to do the same. So here are a few tips to help you along. And a very important part of these tips is how to cheat and get away with it.
First of all, since The Calquarium is reproduced by black-only photocopy, it is highly recommended that you draw your cover with pen and India ink. Earle Shim and Ian Lees use this medium exclusively for their covers. Pencil drawings are acceptable too, but pencil simply doesn't photocopy with nearly the same quality as a black-on-white ink drawing. You can get a bottle of ink and a drawing pen along with a suitable collection of thick and fine pen nibs for about $6.00 at any art store, and at a lot of the larger book stores as well. Be forewarned however that pencil is much more convenient than pen and ink for several reasons. First of all, pencil drawings can be made on normal bond paper, while ink requires an artist's pad (add another $7.00 to the bill for that). Also, it is very easy to make gray colors with a pencil (simply by pressing less hard), but pencil gray does not reproduce well in photocopies and it is exactly for this reason that pen is preferable to pencil. But most importantly, pencil is erasable. Once you make a mistake with ink, you either have to somehow incorporate the mistake into your drawing (a common occurrence), use white out (acceptable for small mistakes) or start over. To say this is frustrating is an understatement.
In practice, you will likely want to lightly sketch the outline of the drawing first with pencil and then go over it again with ink, filling in the black and gray areas. But this brings us to our first problem. Since India ink is a very solid, opaque black, how do you make a gray area? This is usually done by using a fine-tip nib on your pen and making a large number of tiny dots, with the density of the dots determining how dark the gray is. Alternatively, you can draw a series of cross-hatched lines, with the darkness of the area determined by the width and spacing of the lines. However, this cross-hatching technique is really more suitable for very rustic landscapes and drawings of old buildings; it simply looks too coarse in a fish drawing. Earle and Ian both use the dot technique in most of their drawings, but Ian used the cross-hatching technique in the rocks of his Corydoras adolfi drawing.
Corydoras_adolfi
The most detailed and painstaking example of the dot technique is Earle's drawing of a Cichlasoma meeki.
Cichlasoma_meeki
Note how little of this drawing is solid black or white, and how much of it is grayed in with tiny little dots; as shown in this close up of the scales:
Drawing these dots is admittedly very slow going, and a drawing as large and detailed as Earle's Cichlasoma meeki would represent at least twenty hours of work. Not to mention the eye-strain involved as you have to get right up to the paper to be able to separate the dots properly. But despite the drudgery, representing a gray scale with dots is a simple and intuitive process, and you will quickly learn to do it with skill. Just be sure to separate the dots approximately equally for any given shade of gray.
Osteoglossum bicirrhosum
However, Earle's drawings are not just so many dots. A good drawing can have, and indeed should have, some solid black areas as well. Solid black areas add contrast and drama to a drawing. Take a look at Earle's Osteoglossum bicirrhosum. Incidentally, this drawing is (in my opinion) the best original art work to ever grace a North American aquarium society cover, and a big part of its quality is due to the mirror effect created by the solid black on the Osteoglossum bicirrhosum scales. Solid black can be most easily added by painting on the ink with a small water-color brush. However, you will have to use a pen if you want to create white dots on a black background. Note how the scales on the Osteoglossum bicirrhosum back are black near their base, but become grayer near their edge by the addition of white spots on the black background. The scales further fade by becoming black dots on a white background. Unfortunately, making white dots on a black background is even more time consuming than black dots on white. A white dot is produced by penning in black everything except the dot. Or you can dab on a bit of white-out I suppose, but I doubt very much that Earle does it that way.
Pterophyllum scalare
White dots on a black background can be used for other things besides just making a very dark gray. Examine Earle's Pterophyllum scalare. Note how the lateral line continues across the dark vertical bands by becoming a string of white dots, rather than a string of black dots as it is when it crosses a white background.
You should also use the dotting technique to give a three-dimensional look to your drawing. Look at Earle's Mikrogeophagus ramirezi, or more precisely, the rocks they are sitting on. Do you see how the rocks look rounded because of the gradually changing gray scales? Well, these rock are just as two dimensional as the rest of the drawing, but by making the rock progressively darker as you move to the lower left, Earle gets the effect of a rounded rock illuminated from above. But if you have an abrupt change in the darkness of a rock, as for example in Ian Lees' Corydoras adolfi drawing, you get the effect of a broken (rather than rounded) rock.
Mikrogeophagus ramirezi
Now we come to the first bit of cheating you are allowed to do. You can also draw lines. Yes, lines are really cheating. Why? Well, look around you. Is everything you look at outlined in black? Of course not. But lines are accepted as valid representations of object boundaries. So feel free to accent a boundary with a line that really shouldn't be there. Look at the Cichlasoma meeki again. Do you see the line in the rock to the immediate right of the fish? This line accents the edge between the far (shadowed) side of the rock and the near (lighter) side of the rock. Also, the white line along the lower edge of the rocks accents the separation between the rocks and the gravel. Obviously, neither line would really be there (look under some rocks... see any white lines?).
OK, so now you now know how to make lines, how to make different shades of gray, and how to use these grays to give the effect of rounded and broken rocks. What about drawing the fish? Admittedly, this takes some skill to draw in the original outline of the fish. But hey, feel free to trace the fish if you don't think you can draw a good enough one free hand. That's the second bit of permissible cheating. If you can't draw, trace.
Fish drawings generally use one of two different viewpoints: there is the anatomically correct full-side view, and then there is the dramatic view. The side view (like in the Pterophyllum scalare) is certainly the easier of the two views to draw, and this view has its place since it's by far the more useful for fish identification purposes. This is how fishes are invariably drawn in text books and scientific papers. But this view is also, well, boring. You can try your hand at a few side views to practice your drawing technique, but you will (and should) wish to draw something with a little more pizzazz. Go back to the Osteoglossum bicirrhosum or take a look at Earle's drawing of Trichogaster leeri. The fish in these pictures are all doing something, and they are not seen doing it from a formal side position either. You add immeasurably to your drawing by having some drama in it. Fish involved in the spawning act (especially gouramis) or fish involved in parental behavior (especially cichlids or other mouth brooders) are especially interesting subjects.
Trichogaster leeri
Now, here's a big hint. Get the Breeding Aquarium Fish series out of the library and copy one of its photographs to draw your cover. These books are chock full of photographs of fish doing something besides swimming obligingly in front of the camera. You can make your initial light pencil sketch most easily by simply tracing one of these photos (permissible cheat number two). That way you will be avoiding the hardest part of making a good drawing, which is drawing with proper foreshortening. Foreshortening is the change in the apparent shape of an object when viewed from different positions. Look again at Osteoglossum bicirrhosum, but concentrate this time only on the outline of the parent fish. It isn't very arowana-shaped is it? That's because you are looking at a fish almost face on, rather than a side view. Foreshortening is a very difficult skill to get right. In fact, it wasn't until the early Renaissance that anyone ever managed to do it. So if you are not either a trained artist (I assume you are not) or have a remarkable latent talent, you won't be able to draw foreshortened views without a lot of invested time and frustration. Since we need Calquarium covers now, just trace a fish's outline from a book.
So we now have traced an outline of a fish. You still have to ink it in, which is where you will put you newly-acquired dotting skills into practice.
How much detail you add is up to you. It is not necessary to draw every scale of the fish, unless it's a fish like an Osteoglossum bicirrhosum in which case the size of the scales make that a reasonable undertaking. But look at the Cichlasoma meeki. Almost every one of its scales is in place! Talk about labor intensive. If you want to go to the effort Earle did to create such a masterful drawing, feel free. But Danio rerio illustrates the third permissible cheat: you can simplify some of the details. There aren't any scales visible at all on these fish. Ian Lees' Corydoras adolfoi simplified things a bit further. Note that the lower-right fish's under-belly is not drawn in at all, just outlined in black (recall permissible cheat number one, outlining is OK).
Danio rerio
Ian's Corydoras adolfoi and Earle's Cichlasoma meeki also illustrate another thing you should be aware of. Fish are often darker on the back than they are on the belly, so you will likely have a greater density of dots on the top of the fish than near its bottom. This is opposite to the effect you will want to obtain while drawing a rock, since a rock would be lighter on the top (because of the direction of illumination) than it is on the bottom. Look at Earle's Cichlasoma meeki once more. Note how the fish is lighter on the belly than on its back, while the rocks are darker on their bottom edge than along the top. If the fish and rocks were not shaded in this way they simply wouldn't look right, although you might not be able to say exactly why. Now look again at the fish. In order to create a light belly he drew the lines that outline the scales very thinly in the bottom row of scales. Notice also how he outlined some of the upper scales with white rather than black in order to define their edges better against the darker color of the back and side spots. Only in the center of the side spots do the scale outlines disappear entirely, thus creating a dramatic area of solid black.
Paracheirodon innesi
Here's permissible cheat number four: since fish have color, and your ink drawing doesn't, fake the patch of color with a different shade of gray. Look at Earle's Paracheirodon innesi. The red areas in the fish are drawn almost solid black, and the neon blue bands are almost pure white. This looks perfectly normal until you actually compare this drawing to a black and white photograph of a real neon tetra. On the real fish, the red patch isn't significantly darker than its gray back. So, logically, the back and red area should use the same shade of gray in the drawing too. And the blue stripe isn't any brighter than the fishes' silver-white belly (it's just more brightly colored) so why is the stripe significantly lighter than the belly in the drawing? Well, because you couldn't tell the two apart otherwise. This cheat is a lot like the outlining cheat (cheat number one). Both cheats are used to emphasize the difference between two areas when their differences would be too subtle in a more accurately rendered black-on-white drawing.
Here's another hint: you should try to draw a reflection in the fish's eye. This is just a little dab of white in the upper half of an otherwise-black pupil.
And don't overdo the background. A few plant sprigs, a rock, or (in the case of spawning gouramis) a bubble nest, are all you need for a cover drawing. But for an illustration in the magazine's interior pages, you can safely add some more background junk.
The webbing between fin rays (especially on the pectoral fins) is often semi-transparent. The body of the fish is therefore usually visible through the pectoral fins, but the colors of the body appear significantly washed-out when viewed through the fins. The Cichlasoma meeki picture illustrates this nicely. Notice how the anal fin and belly are visible through the pectoral fin, but they appear subtly lighter than they do when viewed directly. Unfortunately, getting the right amount of through-the-fin visibility is difficult, so you might like to show the pectoral fins edge-on (and thus opaque) as they are shown in the Paracheirodon innesi drawing. That's cheat number five.
Anubias barteri
Compared to drawing a fish, tracing and drawing a plant is very easy, so if fish intimidate you, draw a plant instead. If you want to see what you are aiming for, Ian Lees' Anubias barteri is about as good as plant drawings get. The various aquatic plant books all have easily copied specimen illustrations. You might also wish to make your first hand-drawn cover a plant if you don't want to trace one, since plants are a lot more variable in shape (and thus much more forgiving to draw) than fish are.
It is best to make your drawing about the same size as the real cover. If the editors have to significantly enlarge or shrink the drawing to fit the cover, the quality will suffer.
You can paint the background black for some more drama if you wish, but a white background reproduces better and the copy service might not appreciate having to use all that toner.
Some more tips: Fishes with strange fin and/or body shapes are more interesting than simple-bodied fish with bright colors in a black-and-white drawing.
And a lot of fish look kind of funky face-on.
Corydoras
Another hint is that eggs are ridiculously easy to draw once you have mastered the above-mentioned rounding technique.
And make sure you sign your work, and have fun!
?Other aquarium clubs and non-profit organizations can use this, or other articles, in their own journals or web sites, provided that credit is given to the author, the Calgary Aquarium Society, and The Calquarium. In the case of a reprint in a hardcopy publication, two copies of the published work are sent to the Calgary Aquarium Society at its mailing address. And in the case of a reprint in an Internet publication, a link back to the original article site must be provided in a prominent location.