The pesky Lionfish

So, being that this is my first post, I thought I would do something easy to get the lay of the land so to speak. I thought for my first post, I would explain how and why I painted one of my favorite watercolors. I suppose I should start at the beginning on how I got started on it and why I painted it.
It started when a friend of mine was looking to enter a contest. He lives in Belize and there was a local lobster shack that was having a logo contest. Enter your logo and if you win, you get free lobster for a year. So, being the amazing buddy that I am, I got to work right off. We talked on chat about different ideas and well this is what came of it.
This clearly is a rough sketch. Through the sketch, though, came the digital.
The problem, though, became time. I just simply didn't have enough time to complete it. By the time I got back to my friend on the next phase, the contest was over. But, inspiration came from the next conversation. See, as he was relaying how I failed him, we got to talking about the area he was in and how the lion fish were just tearing into the local fish and decimating the reefs.
I always knew lion fish were aggressive, I had seen movies, but I never realized how bad they were for the reefs. This is the link to the Wiki about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterois. Anyway, I thought what a great way to bring awareness to this invasive species and bring some beauty into the world at the same time.
So like always, I got to researching. I went onto the search engines, and started looking at anatomy. I like to get a good idea of the bone structure and how an animal moves before I start to sketch. I don't like to copy a picture, we have copy machines for that. I like to sense of the personality and emotions of my subject before the medium. So like if the subject is aggressive then you would want an aggressive pose. I decided to do one with the full display on show. Once I had done that, I started with the watercolor sketch.
Now, I should have probably planned it better. I should have used more pencil and sketched it out better, skipping the watercolor sketch. But, since I am still learning, mistakes will happen.

I had tried to fill in the background with pink so I would have a uniform platform to work with but it wasn't going the direction I wanted. Plus when I started putting detail into the fin rays some of the black strayed and I needed to cover it.
So, after realizing that I had kind of messed up my painting, I decided to use black as the background to cover over my mistakes in the watercolor sketch and to give contrast to the foreground.

Next, I added detail onto the fins finished up the head and completed the background.

By now, most of the painting is done, I just need to draw the eye into the middle, and I did that by filling in the remaining outside areas and balancing the left and right sides.

aaaaaaannnd done.

I think the piece turned out really well. It catches the eyes of those who visit me and I get to tell them about how the lion fish is killing the reefs. I never did get to finish that logo, although he talked me into parting with another piece. That is a story for another time though.

Thank you for reading my rant. Suggestions are always welcome, and being that this is my first post, I am sure I have much to improve upon.