The Alewife Project
Alewife print in colored pencil (8” x 10”).
The inspiration for the Waquoit Bay Fish Company spawned from the determined and hardy Alewife (Alosa pseudoharengusnalis). Against steep odds, alewife return to their natal rivers each spring to fulfill their life purpose. As I was conceptualizing the Waquoit Bay Fish Company, the plucky alewife seemed a fitting mascot. The company name pays homage to one of the river herring companies that once harvested alewives and blueback herring (collectively known as ‘river herring’) from the Waquoit Bay region of Cape Cod. The Waquoit Herring River Company was established in 1866 to harvest river herring from the Childs River. The Childs River, the natural outlet of Johns Pond to the north, once supported a river herring run. The productivity of the Childs River was curtailed when the Johns Pond outlet was damned to re-route the outflow through the Quashnet River to the east, presumably to support a larger river herring fishery in the Quashnet.
The formation of the Waquoit Bay Fish Company fulfills a long-held dream of mine – to build a creative place where I could share my art and ideas with other people. The logo is the visual identity of a brand, and so creating the logo was an important part of actualizing the dream. If the alewife was going to be the mascot, I was going to need an alewife image, and so the story begins of how a sketch becomes a logo, and the start of the alewife project.
The alewife project is a good example of how I will multi-purpose the fish imagery to produce different products – each unique offshoots of the other. You’ll see the recycling theme repeated frequently throughout the Waquoit Bay Fish Company portfolio – both with respect to imagery and materials. In the case of the alewife project, the original graphite drawing was used to produce both a template for the hand-colored fish prints as well as for the the vectorized black-and-white graphic used in the logo.
The completed graphite drawing of an alewife.
The process for producing fish art starts with various study sketches where I play around with the form of the fish. What are the biologically accurate proportions? What features make the fish unique? Is it aesthetically pleasing? Have I created a harmony in the form? After several sketches I’ll settle on the final form and transfer the drawings to professional grade archival paper. I’ll then use graphite pencils to produce a detailed, life-like drawing. The graphite drawing is then photographed and digitized and can then be used to create hand-colored fish prints.
In the case of the alewife project, I took the process further and worked with the digitized image in photo editing software to produce a black-and-white vectorized graphic. The vectorized graphic was then combined with a font design I’d selected, and the logo was complete! The finalizing of the logo design was highly cathartic – it represented the realization of a dream. Through challenges and determination, I’d persevered to give life to a new creation. And so it goes for the stouthearted alewife.
Final alewife graphic design.
