I was watching an interesting texturing tutorial the other day that reminded me that my image library was pretty much out-of-date. With the incredible leaps and bounds that digital cameras are experiencing, there’s a whole world of interesting high-res images out there that would be handy for colour and texture sampling. I did a bunch of sea creature searches in Flickr and dredged up something unexpected from the bottom of the ocean.

Sea slugs are INCREDIBLE. It blows my mind how many different psychedelic shapes and colours they come in. Wow! Every picture I find displays an incredible variation in colour and shape and texture – it’s incredible to imagine that these are all the same family of creature.

These are all stolen from a tidal pool photography enthusiast, Minette Layne, but they only represent the tip of the sea slug iceberg. Gorgeous! They remind me of lamp-glass jewellery, so many transparent fronds and strange polka-dot patterns with completely unusual colour contrasts. Amazing.