Detlef Jumpertz

Medium: Colour Pencil/Graphite
Size: 420 mm x 590 mm

I'm back to drawing fish - for the time being I'm giving the birds a rest. It was hard deciding which fish to choose, and for whatever reason I have decided to draw a Maori Wrasse, aka Napoleon Fish, aka Humphead.

The males can reach 2m in length, while females rarely exceed about 1m. The Humphead has thick, fleshy lips and a hump that forms on its head above the eyes, becoming more prominent as the fish ages. The colour range is from a bright electric blue to green, a purplish blue, or a relatively dull blue/green.

I think it's both beautiful and ugly at the same time, a kind of cute pig of the piscatorial world. Perhaps that bizarre combination of attributes is what attracted me to it the first place.