An excursion into color

Somewhere drifting in an endless abyss there is a creature with an amorphous body and no face . It’s covered in tentacles and its generations extend across the ages. Jellyfish without the innocent context of Bikini Bottom are like Lovecraftian horrors. More like mushrooms than fish.

I can remember the first time I saw a Jellyfish at a cove in San Diego. It had come ashore to die and it had washed into a little inlet where we were swimming. I remember it was an anxious new experience as its bulging pink body still had envenoming properties and it drifted listlessly in the currents.

I had not intended to color this drawing when I began it. In fact I didn’t intend for this drawing to become a jelly fish. I started drawing with my JinHao 159 on regular white copy paper and a jelly fish emerged from my scribbles. A few days later I felt compelled to paint the drawing with watercolor even though I knew that the paper would not hold up to the moisture. I tried to use as dry of a brush as possible to avoid warping the paper too much, and I feel I was quite successful. However, you can see how the paper puckered up at the edges because of the scan. I was pleased that the Noodler’s Black ink did not bleed at all when I applied the watercolor over top and I plan to try something similar in the near future on good water color paper.