I made this over what feels like a couple of hundred sessions.

I know I’m repeating myself, but I’ve had so many little time as of late, that I haven’t been able to spend a minute even on Freakshow, which has been sitting in my Works In Progress folder for an uncomfortably long time now.

Anyway, bit by bit and at a very leisurely pace I recently managed to complete the illustration below, which had started a few months ago as thing-for-fun-that-I’ll-do-while-watching-Netflix kind of endeavor.

The idea for this came from a holiday I had in Corsica some years ago.
A friend and I decided to go spear fishing. Nothing fancy, the goal was mostly to look at the wildlife, while occasionally trying to catch something to eat on the barbecue in the evening.
As it turned out, the entire expedition resulted in a bad sunburn and the slight humiliation inflicted upon us by a smart octopus, which just kept evading us by swimming a couple of inches below the maximum range that our skill allowed.

But I digress.

While looking for fish to catch, we came upon the edge of a submerged cliff, which disappeared into what seemed like and endless, bottomless abyss.

Instead of rocks, colourful fishes and all that, there was now just darkness, and surely an entire ecosystem hidden not far below us.
I (we) felt suddenly small and inconsequential, puny beings before something titanic.
As if that was not a place where humans are used or supposed to hang out.

My imagination being what it is, I immediately imagined the big scary face of some kind of hungry leviathan coming to us from the dark depths, with cold expressionless eyes and its mouth a mess of fangs.
My friend and I couldn’t clearly talk to each other, but I’m sure he had the same thought, as we turned around and swam back towards the shore without even a gesture.

Anyway, a while ago this long forgotten memory resurfaced (see what I did?) and I started doing this.
Only, in this version, the human in the picture is there to kick ass.

by Paolo Puggioni