I cut up a sheet of Bristol into ACEO sizes since I decided it was high time to experiment with that. I offered to draw some kind friends anything of their choice as a thank you for proofing my paper.

The first of these is Zian's, who asked for a happy sea turtle.

I wondered what might make a sea turtle happy and decided finding a lot of its favourite food would probably do the trick. This lead to a desire to draw moon jellies, as the moon jelly corridor in the (since replaced) "Jellies - Living Art" exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium has been very influential for me, and then research into what kind of sea turtle would be happy with a swarm of moon jellies.

I discovered that leatherback turtles eat soft foods, particularly jelly fish, because their mouth is soft as opposed to the harder beak on other sea turtles. They're also critically endangered, the largest of all sea turtles, and the only living species of its genus.

Unfortunately I couldn't find any reference photos of a leatherback's belly so I had to guess based off of what the photos did show. I also took some liberties with the colors of the moon jellies.

Drawn with PrismaColor pencils and then painted over with watercolor.
I started experimenting with white color pencil under the watercolor to render the play of light on waves at the surface and picking up pigment with the brush to show beams of light.

The scan is larger than the original, which is ACEO size: 3.5x2.5"
The original was given to Zian (so, ya know, clearly not for trade).