50 Sharks - My new personal project.

As you will have seen from my posts on social media, I’ve recently started a new personal project, it’s a big one, so I thought it would be a good idea to write a blog post talking about it in more detail!

I’ve always been obsessed with sharks, sharks and dinosaurs have always been my favourite animals since I was a kid, I’ve always been fascinated by how they basically are real life monsters. Some people will probably know this already, but every year around 100 million (but I’ve read somewhere that the real figure is more like 270 million) sharks are killed every year by humans. So for a while now I’ve been wanting to do some kind of personal project that I could use to raise some money for a charity that protects sharks.

When I took a social media break last month I really made sure I used it to get my life and goals back in order and plan new projects and ideas, I’ve been stuck in a bit of a creative rut recently so the draw 100 somethings project (see video above) seemed like a perfect way to get out of it. I still needed something to draw though, and the more I thought about it the more I thought about how it would be a cool idea to design 100 different shark characters. I designed a couple of shark characters last year (below), I loved doing them and they're probably one of my favourite designs that I've ever done. However, I also want to speed up my digital workflow a lot, so instead of doing 100 drawings, I’ve decided I’m going to do 50 full colour, digital shark character designs, who knows, it might turn into 100, but it’s 50 for now!

What I intend to do is to probably collate all of the different designs and turn them into a book that I can sell through my website, and any profits that are made will be donated to the chosen charity.

I’m also going to film the creation of each design and talk about how I created it and why I designed it the way that I did and turn each one into a Youtube video which I will post to my channel every Monday. The first of which is already live on my channel and I’ll also link it below!

I’ve completed two designs now and started the third, usually I get really bored of personal projects quite quickly but honestly I’m having so much fun with this one and I actually really want to get a piece finished so that I can move onto the next!

This is obviously going to take quite a while to complete, but I’m hoping by the end of it I’ll have a product that I can sell to raise money for a good cause and that will also show a real improvement in my work.

Let me know your thoughts on this project and if you think it’s a good idea etc. Also if you have any ideas for shark designs let me know on social media and if I use any of them I’ll make sure to include your name and some info in the book once it’s complete!