The breakthrough came when I realized that it was the neck structure connecting the head
above the shoulders that gave the impression that I was drawing some sort of lizardy/fishy
man rather than a monster with certain unhuman sttributes. So by pushing the head forwards and down, lengthening the neck, I found that it was instantly more reminiscient of a shark's head seamlessly joining it's trunk.
This breakthrough came about from considering how to make the head more sharklike, and considering how a shark's head actually looks. Though when I referred back to The Last Rakosh's cover art, I saw that this anatomical structure was present there, too, and that I had simply overlooked it. It might have registered somewhere at the base of my brain, but I suddenly felt I knew which way to go from this point on.
My next step was to study a shark's anatomy in greater detail to inform my drawing of a shark-like visage. Like any good illustrator, I have a wealth of photoreference material to inform my practise (
no one can know what
everything looks like in intimate detail!) but in this case I turned to a Google Image search for GREAT WHITE SHARK.