Jumbo Shrimp

Back in 2004 I had a marvelous illustration teacher in the School of Visual Arts, Joo Chung.
One of his assignments was to take an oxymoron and illustrate it. The culmination in it was a very poor painting, but it was important in two ways:

a) I discovered my love for painting animals, not humans, and sent me down the path of illustration work that I follow now.
b) I learned how to actually render an object and paint something with depth and layers and all those juicy things.

So every few years, I try to recreate the Jumbo Shrimp painting as sort of a way to catalogue how I'm progressing along as an illustrator. This was attempt #2 back in 2006.

And yes, they're eating whales.
JUMBO!

edit: in case you don't read the comments, I threw up a version of the 2004 piece at my website: [link]