A Deep Sea painting

With the start of the holiday season, friends sometimes ask me to create paintings to give as gifts. This year, my friend from college wanted to give her husband a painting of his favorite species of deep sea urchin, Echinocrepis. As a marine invertebrate biologist, he worked on these very cool echinoderms. In addition to Echinocrepis, she also wanted the painting to feature a sea pig. Because... sea pigs! The challenge here was that there are so very few (only 2 or 3) reference photos and videos of Echinocrepis. I used a combination of watercolor and gouache to create this deep sea landscape and show Echinocrepis in the foreground and the funny little sea pig foraging in the background.