Little houses, all in a row

The theme this week was the "Great Barrier Reef." I found it rather intimidating, since I could picture right off all these amazing, hyper-colorful underwater seascape prints, brimming with dozens of different life forms. I decided to focus on just the coral part of things - and doing it in a cutesey, anthropomorphic style. My take was to draw a little village of coral polyps, each in its own little "house" of calcified excretions. I looked around for color inspiration and found this:


Color by COLOURlovers

I originally wanted it to be a little more organic - not so geometric of a layout, and each house is slightly different - but that was giving me fits so I stuck with one "style" of house in a regular hex layout. It's hard to see at this scale, but each little roof has a thatch texture and the walls have a brick texture.



This came in 148 out of 228, with 49 votes. There actually weren't any fabrics that went as all-out as I had imagined (how much easier it is to imagine those kinds of illustrations than bring them to life!), but this one in graphic style one probably got the closest. I also liked this one in an indigo/gold color scheme, and this assortment of corals and sea plants. For more subtle entries, I liked the brain coral texture, tonal sea plants, and super-simplified fish.