Mini workshops - Synchronized swimming - figuring things out

To start of this workshop I looked at some general illustrations and photos of people swimming, some of the images I found were beautiful and they also came in a variety of different styles, some realistic and others quite cartoony. I chose synchronized swimming over swimming in the wild just because I feel like this route would allow me to focus more on the character instead of the location. A lot of the illustrations I found resembled patterns which was pretty cool but I was also interested in how the bodies became almost tangled up to make these crazy shapes. After watching a few videos on YouTube I can see that this sport is not as easy as it looks and can be incredibly stressful at times.

Some of my earlier thumbnails featured tentacles wrapping up and getting tangled in the water which I think helped to simulate how hard these moves are to choreograph and execute. Using something like an octopus's limbs to simulate each dancer would be a cool idea, a group of separate beings coming together and working as if they shared one brain.
This is getting pretty deep...

  Whilst exploring some different ideas I searched up on some images that had an obvious split between surface and sea bed as I feel like that is the simplest way to emulate the two planes. One image even features an octopus so it seems like fate has decided this one for me.

I'd also looked at playing around with perception, some of the images above feature monsters heads being mistaken for islands which is a pretty cool concept. The sea in most of the images dominate the picture to emphasize how large and vast it is. For my image though I feel like what lies beneath is less important than what is on top. I want to have an octopus like creature crammed into the bottom of my image underwater, he will be working hard and wriggling away, his tentacles will mimic the legs of synchronized swimmers and he will be getting top marks for his efforts.

Above is a piece that I made over the summer titled 'Under Da Sea'
It was part of my work for the little book of texts and was also my first attempt at drawing something under water. In this case I used a lot of blue gradients and messed around with transparencies to emulate plant life at the waterbed. There are a couple of bubbles scattered around to add movement to some of the elements. When I go to colour the workshop piece I should consider the methods I used to create this image.

I have an angular style which is directly inspired from older cartoons from my childhood, because of such I was struggling to make a tentacle look like a woman's leg. I looked into some of my favorite cartoons for inspiration and soon figured it out. I always loved the running gag in many cartoons that featured a woman's leg stepping out of a car, it would then pan up and the leg would not belong to a woman. The Spongebob image above always makes me laugh, he goes to rob a bank and to do so he uses a pair of tights as a robbers mask, as he goes to tighten the headdress it snaps into the shape of a woman's leg, absolutely priceless. The character on the far bottom right has a really angular set on boots on which is what I would want to go for, I might even add stockings to make it totally clear that the tentacles are mimicking women's legs.

This is the finished image, original drawings can be seen in sketchbook folder. I am really happy with how the legs turned out and they have plenty of room to breath i think. I used a similar gradient idea for the octopus as I had done on the previous piece 'Under Da Sea' and it works well to show that it is underwater. I think the clock needs to be centered a little bit more to the left and i could maybe play around with taking the elements away and just leave the legs kicking out of the water. Happy with the lack of line work also, the way I have drawn the hands remind me of the art style from Samurai Jack. The black and white signs are also a homage to Cartoon Network, home to many of my influences.