Viperfish Wall Art - Maquette and Plaque.

Just before Christmas I began working on my final fish piece. I wanted to base the design around the idea of a third fish maquette to display along with the other two deep sea fish (anglerfish and fangtooth fish) that I had already created to hang on the wall. I also wanted to design something with the idea of using the cut outs to make a second piece as I had come to do with the majority of my designs in this series of work. I had developed a number of different pieces so far and as I knew this would be my last for the time being I wanted to do it in both the maquette and plaque form I had been working in.

I went back to my research on marine life and looked at a number of different species. The important thing I wanted to bear in mind was that whatever I decided on had to fit in style and thematically with the other two deep sea fish but still be different and have its own defining qualities that would make it differ just enough from the previous fish. At the same time I didn't want it to be the odd one out, or be too similar to one of the previous fish, all three would have to sit alongside one another comfortably and look part of the same set, yet vary in their own unique way.

The design I came up with was based on a Viperfish. I wanted to create the idea of an animal in motion so trying to develop the way its body curved when turning and trying to replicate that in the lattice style I had been working with was a challenge. Making the three dimensional maquette would show more clearly this idea of the body curving and twisting round. However, for the flat plaque piece I would make with the cut outs it was essential the design drawn into the frame would be clear in a flat, two dimensional format as well. I worked on the spine and the fins that ran along it to achieve this idea of an animal in motion and the differing sides of its body visible.

As with previous pieces I kept the out cuts to one side as I removed them from the frame of the fish. This left me with the pieces for the plaque as well as the frame/base for the maquette to be built up from. As you can see from the image above the flat design still had to give the impression of the fish's three dimensional form in the curvature of its body.

The next step was to build up the three dimensional form of the maquette, I decided to start at the most complex section, where the spine curves around, and work from there as this would influence the rest of the sculpture. By putting in this back bone I also create the frame in which to rest all the other strips of card along as I built up the fish's body. Trying to gauge what height to build the curving spine and then determine how gradually it would slope down to the flat end of the tail and top of the spine. At first I felt I had made the gradient far too steep and this looked really odd but as I began to build up the rest of the fish it made more and more sense to have quite a high and prominent back bone. Not only did it give a stronger visual sense to the sharpness and dramatic effect with which the fish was turning, but it also looked more anatomically accurate for a fish to have quite a high ridge as they tend to be relatively flat and slimmer than they appear side on. A lower, ore rounded shape would have come across more serpent-like and ultimately inaccurate.

Below is the finished plaque piece ready for painting. These had come to be relatively simple to assemble. The hard work is cutting them out from the card, or at least the most time consuming part of the process. However, as I finish cutting them from the maquette frame the hard work starts on the three dimensional piece. So its nice at that stage to have a rewarding time simply gluing down all the pieces to form a by-product piece of art from the maquette frame. Looking back on the development of this process i can't believe I started out by discarding these pieces when I was focused only on making the maquette. At least I quickly realised the potential of getting two pieces of art from one work load and producing the opposite or negative version of the maquette frame by assembling it's jigsaw like off cuts.

My next stage for the maquette was to build up the head off the flat frame. This was the next crucial piece in gauging the volume of the fish and would make filling in the body sections much simpler and more efficient to achieve.

As with my other maquettes there was a strong influence of biological engineering, and creating the idea of a piece that looked man made but reflective of nature and the structure and repeation found in nature. To add to the rusty, metal style of the maquette I looked at varying colour schemes that would reflect the idea the fish had been bashed together out of metal, and fit in colour-wise with the other two fish I had so far created. After the vivid, rusty red of the anglerfish and the golden, tarnished brass look of the fangtooth I decided to go with a much colder, steely blue for the viperfish.

 The photo above shows the maquette over the plaque piece showing how they both line up together, being from the same piece of mount board. The picture shows the stencil I started making from the Viperfish design, I ended up doing this with all my designs to date for convience if I make any more.

Below is the finished Viperfish maquette and wall plaque. I've included a couple of close up shots of the plaque's surface detail too showing the textured surface layers in a bit more detail.