18% original size

Inspiration
As I'm sure most people who've watched Finding Nemo felt, I've always awed at the under water effects they did, they showed me that VERY convincing water is possible to reconstruct. So that movie has been a big inspiration for me. One of the most beautiful parts of the movie in my opinion was with the jellyfish. I've always loved jellyfish and have gotten a great opprotunity to study them seeing as the aquarium near me has a very large section dedicated solely to jellies. Something about the fact that they're so gorgeous yet so deadly at the same time intrigues me. So here's my tribute. If you haven't seen the movie yet, you crazy, go rent it. My favorite part about this image are the frilly tentacles (oral arms) that come out of the bottom of the jellyfish and how they compliment my opacity efforts making them look much better than I thought they would. Even though out of the few days I've been working on this they only took about thirty minutes to do. Like in the movie I love how they're all bunched up with lots of blue space on the side, I don't know why I just do, but mines got more purples and blues than they did.

Technical Gibber
This was made without filters and the only layer effects I used were slight (and hardly visible since I've shrunk it) bevel on the lappets. I started with the background water (background is ALWAYS first so you can sense the lighting that will be cast on your subject visually) I set out several bells on oh, about seven layers. Since the original is so huge (to me and my computer) I made several of them share a layer. I considered blurring some of them for the sake of making them look closer or farther away, but I decided that I really like the crisp clean lines and went with opacity changes instead. I payed a lot more attention to transparencies than I expected but in the end, although it doesn't look like I was expecting it to, I like the outcome and hope you do too.

Edit: Sorry, I like this version better.