I get ideas from all sorts of places.
This is a pic of a concept for a pyo hippocampus. This head is a digital concoction of a pen and ink sketch of a hazel nut leaf I did, combined with a digital rendering of a horse, and texture suggested by some cool tire track marks that are imprinted on the cement floor of our new building.
It probably isn’t necessary to put scales up the neck like this pic, since a furry neck would be much easier to hand paint with a brush and much easier for me to sculpt! I think a hippocampus would be SO much fun to paint! I can imagine running every horse color together with every fish color.. pinto and koi , dapple grey and silver trout, red roan with …uh… lion fish… or something like that..
This hippocampus is giving me trouble however, not because of the crazy hair ( I’ll need to round that mane down a bit, obviously) but because of the difficulty in sculpting a horse sitting on a fish tail. I hate to stick a base on it because I hate bases on sculpture. However, I am having a hard time imagining how to get it to stand up! When I get a chance to photo it, I’ll put a pic of the partially finished sculpture in my forum gallery, so that you can see the problem.
Here is a link to the gallery: http://www.windstoneeditions.com/galleries/ I’ll try to get a pic today.