Coral Reef Preliminary sketch

This semester I am working on an illustration of a Hawaiian Coral Reef for Alice Carter's Art 113B class (aka, the "Tidepool" class). I started off by doing a bunch of research on my 50 species and their habitat. Then I began making several exploratory thumbnails. On the left are a few of the many thumbnails I made to find a composition to start with. I chose a final one and enlarged it. I then began redrawing it to flesh it out into the sketch you see on the right. My next step will be to draw all of the 50 species and arrange them in the composition to prepare for my pencil rendering. After that, it's on to the final acrylic painting.