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Description
A salmon. In a box.

A drawing in the formline style, developed by many native groups along the Northwest Coast of North America, such as the Tlingit and the Haida. This salmon design is more traditional than most of the other designs I've made, given the subject matter and the boxy shape. Yes, it's a salmon. It's just been rearranged a bit.

This design was very difficult for me, and I am not particularly happy with how it turned out. I eventually arrived at this design in the form of a small pencil sketch, and I think that in copying it over to a larger format, a lot of the strength and flow of the original composition was lost. You can see the original sketch here, with labels for all the body parts in the design: [link]

Pen and marker.

This is an example of a distributed formline design, where the parts of the animal are rearranged to fill a geometric shape, ignoring anatomical relationships.

If you like this artwork, and you want to learn more about the cultural context in which the style was developed, please see the excellent book A Story as Sharp as Knife : The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World by Robert Bringhurst. I've written a review of it, which you can read here: [link]

Enjoy!

Naturalistic: Leaping Velociraptor
Configurative: Baby Turtle
Expansive: Future of Frog
Distributed: Salmon Box

Description
A salmon. In a box.

A drawing in the formline style, developed by many native groups along the Northwest Coast of North America, such as the Tlingit and the Haida. This salmon design is more traditional than most of the other designs I've made, given the subject matter and the boxy shape. Yes, it's a salmon. It's just been rearranged a bit.

This design was very difficult for me, and I am not particularly happy with how it turned out. I eventually arrived at this design in the form of a small pencil sketch, and I think that in copying it over to a larger format, a lot of the strength and flow of the original composition was lost. You can see the original sketch here, with labels for all the body parts in the design: [link]

Pen and marker.

This is an example of a distributed formline design, where the parts of the animal are rearranged to fill a geometric shape, ignoring anatomical relationships.

If you like this artwork, and you want to learn more about the cultural context in which the style was developed, please see the excellent book A Story as Sharp as Knife : The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World by Robert Bringhurst. I've written a review of it, which you can read here: [link]

Enjoy!

Naturalistic: Leaping Velociraptor
Configurative: Baby Turtle
Expansive: Future of Frog
Distributed: Salmon Box