Seahorses have been on my mind for a while. Who doesn’t love seahorses?

Seahorses at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, taken June of last month.

They’re adorable, they’re soothing to watch, and they have the interesting characteristic of gender-swapping gestational duties.

Seahorse at Gumbo Limbo, a sea turtle rescue I visited last week in southern Florida.

The drawings I summon, whole cloth, from my head, don’t always come out the way I envision them. Sometimes I feel the muse is guiding me (as I did with Athena), but usually I end up with a cartoonish representation of a thing that I can describe better in words than in pictures.

This is what it looks like when I try to draw a seahorse from my own imagination with no referential images.

A few weeks ago, I had a brilliant idea for a T-shirt, which I ran past my stepkids. They seemed to think it was a pretty amusing idea, and I’m very happy with the sketch I drew a few days ago. For this image, I looked at a bunch of photos of seahorses, but I also looked at the design of a popular cartoon I wanted to parody.

Can anyone guess the name of this noble lady?

I’ll be working on the digital version of this image today, and hope to have a good design within the week (if you know what fandom I’m spoofing, you probably realize that her mane is flowing in the wrong direction, and besides which, I didn’t make her head big enough for her eyelashes), but first, I’ll be blogging a bit more. Now that I’m started to get page views and followers, I’m going to attempt to update 5 days a week!