The Sea Serpent

This was supposed to be a quick doodle. Quick, I say.
It wasn't. I blame the conte. Conte and I aren't the best of friends, and, you've got to admit, trying to draw water with 3 colours (4, if you count white, I suppose) - so 4 colours: Black, dark brown, light brown and white - that's a bit daunting.

The purpose of this drawing was to illustrate two things:
1) How my little dragon-dude swims. Rather anhinga-like, all in all.
2) In being a little reptilian anghinga, I've tied my dragon in to sea serpent mythology. How? Well, look at it. One of the common descriptions of sea serpents goes something like, "There's a little head on a long neck... and then 3 bumpies following, just breaking the water's surface...." And what do you see here? A head on an elongated neck, with 3 humped shapes behind. Okay, 4. The only reason that there's 4, though, is because I wanted to show that the 1st hump was actually the paired elbow joints of the wings. Seen in profile, at least, this would look like 1 hump. The middle hump is more the base of the tail, and the last is the tail spade, in one of those less frequent occurences when it's quite visible.
I'm ignoring the size factor that's frequently associated with sea serpents. Mainly because people are well known to exaggerate the size of some water critter. But then, there's also plently of really long water critters (like oarfish, for example- definite source of sea serpent myths right there) that could account for the perceived general largeness of sea serpents.

I'm not overly pleased with this, actually. So I'm considering it a study for a slightly larger sized version. I wanted a profile view, but the paper was too small... and I really can't draw water.... which I really need to fix, seeing as how I've got a dragon that's flippin' insular - good ol' H20's a little hard to avoid.

I cropped the very edges of the image - and cut off the bottom inch or so of water because it looked really bad. Then I put a PS border around it and scrawled my name. W00t.
The actual size of what you're looking at is about 8"x7". Not that big, compared to what I've been getting used to when working with things like conte. I have no idea what kind of paper it is that I'm using... but it's really nice and thick artsy paper.

I'm now going to refrain from going on and on about this here dragon o' mine. Hazards of posting art that's intrinsic to your thesis... y'just want to talk about it....