Wildlife on the Thames

My entry for this years London Transport art contest. This year's theme was a positive scene of the river Thames to promote it, but you also had to include one of more modes of London transport.

I chose to depict the wildlife you can find on the Thames for a number of reasons: I love wildlife; the Thames has really improved for wildlife in the past few decades and gone from being one of the dirtiest city rivers in the world to one of the cleanest; and a lot of people think you can't find wildlife in big cities which is not true in the slightest. The last one was my biggest reason for using this theme.

The bird in the sky is a common tern, the one in the water is a great crested grebe, and the fish are perch. All can be found in or on the Thames, along with a huge variety of other species.

I'd love some constructive criticism on this as it was the first time I coloured a lineart entirely digitally. My technique could use a lot of improvement. Imagine this image is marked for critique (I miss my sub! ) but less serious comments are very much appreciated too.

By the way, I had to finish this image in a huge hurry. But I really wish I hadn't used a gradient for the background colour. It looks so tacky. I told myself 'I'm going to colour this digitally and no gradients will be involved!' and then what did I go and do?

Pencil lineart outlined in pen, then scanned in and coloured digitally.