Captain Blackberry Beard's Pirate Ship

I've been doing tons of drawing the past two weeks to flesh out my design for Captain Blackberry Beard's Ship. I would post some of the dozens of drawings that I did to get to this point but it would probably take me all day to scan all of them and upload them on this site.

First, I researched sail boats and pirate ships and started drawing several different styles. I also found a pirate ship model at a local flea market that aided in this design. My friend Joe Dillon lent me a book on Sail boats, my other friend Chuck Kivlen gave me a motorcycle toy that had a Shark's head on it and my friend Tom Johnson gave me a book about the North Carolina Pirates. These all helped me out.

The design that I had in my head was a pirate ship that would be built using old powerlines as masts and a robot shark head at the front of the boat. Bluish Purple would be a dominating glowing color that would indicate that the ship is powered by Blackberry Beard's "Purple Electricity".

Next I researched sharks, shark heads and how other artists handled designing a robot shark. The main focus for me was to establish a simple shape for the shark's head and figure out how it's jaw would open and close. This was the most difficult of the whole design and took the most research and drawing.

While I was drawing the shark heads, I started studying different powerlines and began to notice them more when I was driving my car. There were several that I noticed such as simple ones made of wood, huge cylindrical steel ones and other ones composed of intersecting steel beams that formed X's. For the masts of the ship I decided to go with those designs simply because they almost completely simplify a ship's mast and cargo nets that a pirate can climb. Basically, by using the X design, the mast head not only serves as the support for the sails but can also be climbed by the pirates without the use of a cargo net.

As I was designing the entire shape of the boat, I came to a conclusion that the fin on top of the Shark's head can serve another purpose in addition to simply reinforcing that the ship is a shark. Traditionally in old pirate novels, there is always a plank that pirates make their prisoners walk in hopes of having them eaten by sharks. Instead of doing that with my ship, I decided that the purple segments of the fin would extend out toward the center of the ship and create a series of stairs to the top of the fin. When someone walks up the stairs to the top, the curvature of the fin can be a sliding board that Blackberry Beard forces his victims down which would land them directly in front of the shark's face. Then the shark would chomp the victim away.