Quillback Rockfish
A couple months ago, I thought I would start a completely new, completely different approach to my illustrating. I was hoping to create a series of minimalistic, almost cartoonish, yet proportionately and scientifically accurate portraits of local marine species. The ones I grew up with.
My challenge was to embrace a combination of line art and stippling, using a single .03 generic black felt-tip pen on medium textured cold press Fabriano watercolour paper. Although I feel quite comfortable with line art, I really wanted to focus on the dots! Stippling is a completely new concept to me.
AND when I’m finished, I will finally make prints available! Just a few. I’ve found a wonderful local printer to work with to make a limited run of each species I complete.
I’m pretty excited to share these. I’ve completed a few already, you can check some of them out in the Shop, and I’ll be posting new species posts in the coming days. The series is called Native Marine Aquatics of the Pacific Northwest. I’ve had a great time doing this little study so far. Lots of beautiful species still to cover. So here I go.
One of my absolute favorite local species is the Quillback Rockfish. One of 36 different species of Rockfish belonging to the genus Sebastes found in Canada’s Pacific waters, and one I saw on the regular while fishing the waters off Pender Island as a child.
The name, sebastos, is Greek for ‘magnificent’ referring to their remarkable, almost tropical appearance. This genus is filled with colourful cousins, many of which I hope to illustrate in the future.
The Quillback’s species name comes from the Latin words malus and gero meaning ‘mast’ and ‘to bear’, which basically translates into “I bear a mast” ..very apt.
Reaching a maximum size of 20 inches or so, the Quillback Rockfish sports 13 wickedly sharp spines with venomous glands at the base of each. The poison is not strong enough to kill you, but definitely a painful and itchy experience. The poison is however an effect anti-predator adaptation.
Like most other Rockfish they are slow to reach maturity (around 11 years) and can grow to be very old. The oldest Quillback Rockfish was a Canadian, with an impressive lifespan of 76 years. Females tend to grow larger and older than males and give birth to live young (viviparous).
Considered an ‘inshore’ rockfish, Quillback live alongside yelloweye rockfish (S. ruberrimus), copper rockfish (S. caurinus), China rockfish (S. nebulosus), black rockfish (S. melanops) and tiger rockfish (S. nigrocinctus).
Quillback Rockfish are solitary, minimally migratory, and are very localized in where they live, so they are particularly vulnerable to overfishing. Thankfully a network of protected Rockfish Conservation Areas have been created.
I really think I achieved the accuracy I set out to capture, while retaining a bit of my own cartoonish style. I hope you like it. I’m quite happy with the results.
– Aaron.