Usil Concept Sketch

I know I'm not supposed to post anything until after finals are done, but I might as well get the lineart in before I get caught up in all that studying.

~akantorMH is holding a neat little contest about kaijufying... *pause for dramatic effect*... a Cichlid fish. Yes, those harmless little aquarium fishies that you see in tanks and rivers and oceans all over the world. I figured I might as well enter because I needed a token fish kaiju or two to work with, and some primordial kaiju on the side.

I chose the Discus Fish, because there are literally no discus fish kaiju on dA, and the name alone fits with the theme I wanted. Usil here is a solar fish deity for an underwater civilization. I had a hard time finding the name for him, but I eventually settled with something primitive but badass-sounding: the Etruscan solar god, as mentioned in the Wikipedia article on Helios:

"The Etruscan god of the Sun, equivalent to Helios, was Usil. His name appears on the bronze liver of Piacenza, next to Tiur, the moon."

Because of the whole sun-god thing, I decided to include that in the cosmetics as well, and turn him into some kind of solar disc of a fish. I once tried a solar deity fish named Piscis Sola based on Leedsicthys, which worked decently but just didn't look distinctive enough. So for this round I decided to put the cosmetics of my previous deity fish on a discus fish and see how that looked. Those dots on the sides and fins are supposed to be luminescent (It'll look better in the color drawing, promise!). I imagine that he absorbs and gives off light through them, including Frickin' Laser Beams if he needs to fight. I'll probably include lights inside the mouth too, since I intend him to be a pelagic filter feeder and so I would like to see him lure plankton into his mouth with his light show. The barbels were there because Discus Fish have filamentous extensions on the bottom fins, judging from the Wiki pic, so hell, why not?

The cruise ship on the bottom left was intended for scale, and the top right doodle is what he'd look like at an angle. He's huge, true, but he's also quite narrow, allowing him to slip through gaps quite easily. I'm debating whether he can swim through air as well, powered by the most ancient type of mana in my kaijuverse, but since he is a fish of the sun after all I think it is very likely.

If this works out, I'll try throwing in another one too for the moon. Zebra Tilapias look fun.