The Monsters of Loch Ness
Loch Ness is the largest fresh water lake in Scotland. It has murky black water going as far down as a thousand feet in places and the debate about whether or not it is home to a population of unknown aquatic creatures has gone on for many years. Many people have seen the famous surgeon’s photograph and when it was later discovered to be a hoax, just a modified childs toy with some dramatic lighting, the debate was over. The loch ness monster is bull. The end. But for those who have seen the creature first hand, no amount of photographic fakery is going to change their mind about it.
The completed design.
Many people have seen a very large creature in and around the waters of loch ness and what they describe fits the description of no living animal. Either the animal is a new species, unrecognized by science, or it is a living fossil, a Plesiosaur, which has lived in those waters for thousands of years. Animals once thought extinct have turned up before, the Coelecanth is a famous example. To science this was a huge discovery, but local fisherman had been catching and eating the fish for years and to them it didn’t seem like such a big deal. The same could be true for Nessie. Science has yet to discover what many people in Scotland already know. Loch Ness can support, and is supporting a sustainable population of these creatures.
One of my Plesiosaur sketches.
For my shirt design, I looked at images of Plesiosaurs for inspiration. I don’t have a lot of trouble believing that dinosaurs could still exist, because many similar creatures have been spotted for years in other parts of the world. I wont go into that now. To keep up with my strange creature theme so far, I took the same approach to creating the Nessie design that I did with Bigfoot and the Thunderbird. The sketch was cleaned up in Photoshop, then traced in Illustrator, then brought back into Photoshop for the final texture you see in the image. I’ll be working on other famous lake monsters in the future with slightly different styles, but this seemed like a good starting point. I produced two graphics for most of these designs, one black for light colored shirts and one white for dark colored shirts. For now I’ve been keeping it white or black for digital direct printed shirts.
