018. Flounder

Flounder is Ariel's best friend in The Little Mermaid and often accompany's her on her adventures, although he's frightened easily and would rather not go he tags along in order to prove himself to be brave as well as keep Ariel safe.

I've decided to model the picture above since there's not a whole lot of freedom with fish to make a freestanding model, I always picture him in the top left scene floating above the water so I quite like this pose. I think this would be perfect to maybe add a thin resin pour to or maybe even make a waterball or bubble for him to live in at some point in the future.

The hardest part will probably be getting his awesome fish mohawk just right, but for the most part I think he'll be a pretty fun character to sculpt. I'm really looking forward to the ornamental version of this one and I think the patterns will look awesome along with his stripes and colours, I'll be working on the model throughout today so the WIP post will be out later for a first look at the model. Character trivia is below.   

• Ariel calls flounder a guppy, which actually means baby in mermaid speek.
• Although his name would imply otherwise, he is not a flounder but rather a yellow tropical fish with teal stripes. 
• Flounder comes from a large family, with numerous siblings. His actual name, according to "The Evil Manta", is Guppy Number 35.
• While he is obviously not a flounder, it is most likely that Flounder is instead a sergeant major, because of him being an at least yellow tropical fish with blue vertical stripes.
• Originally, a deleted character named Breaker the Dolphin was going to be Ariel's comrade, but he was replaced by Flounder in the final film instead.
• In the Broadway version of The Little Mermaid, Flounder has a secret crush on Ariel, but gives up those feelings after seeing how much Ariel loves Eric.
• Flounder's eyes turn red when he is scared, as seen in the sunken ship when he screams at a skull.
• In the TV series, Edan Gross went through puberty and his voice got deeper. But the voice director refused to replace him and Gross continued to voice Flounder for the rest of the series, regardless of how low his voice was.

See you in the next post, 

Harley