Shark Exhibit Mural Artwork

I also haven’t posted the artwork of the other murals so I might as well do them right now.

This was a fun guy to make. I took a photo of a great white, and then painted over him with my computer tablet in Photoshop to change the proportions and details. I moved a lot of stuff around and added muscles here and there. It was nice to have a photo to directly sample from. I think it helped acheive a good level of realism, plus I worked on adding a lot of texture details to the smooth skin surface along with some scarring. I stole some details from the whale shark, the only really huge shark that’s still left in the oceans. As a side note, these things fed on whales and were around 50 feet long!

This backdrop I had some trouble with originally. I had a photographer say that I could use his photo for the ramp and then he never got back with me. I then decided to just make my own of a bait ball with a shark going through it. Obviously it’s not a thing I could just go grab a photo of. Painting that many fish would be a huge pain in the neck. So then I realized that making 3d computer generated fish would be the best route to go. I ended up modeling just one fish and then duplicating and adding variations.

This image shows the set up of the 3d scene. The green thing is the camera view, the magenta things are lights, and then the cyan and light yellow are the fish. The blue are the “bones” which you can use to move models (think of bending an arm, but then apply that to a school of fish). The yellow fish show one group of fish that I arranged. I tried to create that natural flow that a school of fish has. I was happy with the results and the final image.

The shark in the artwork is a photo from our shark tank with some color correction and painting over it.