11. Discovering the Style

Jellyfish Picture Book Process

Hey y’all!

Last week I was at the beach, so you know I dragged my family to the local aquarium! There were only Moon Jellies to look at, but I’m successfully getting Butterbean obsessed with aquatic life and jellyfish too. (She’s already adopted my fondness for fungi!)

Besides watching jellyfish pulse around, I’ve also been further experimenting with the style of my book’s illustrations. I explored drawing more jellyfish with watercolor pencils and inverting the artwork in Photoshop as I described in the last post. I tried to draw these jellyfish smaller and more detailed to see if I could get a little closer to the vision in my head. Here’s my favorite one:

Original painting on the left, inverted painting on the right

I still can’t believe how cool these jellyfish drawings (paintings?) look when inverted. It’s tricky to remember to invert the colors in my head as I’m painting, but it kinda works! I think the way it switches the values and highlights/shadows around is what makes it look more translucent, watery, and eerie. All the things I’m going for!

Besides the inversion experiments, I’ve also been playing with some of Butterbean’s paints.