Hello, dear Steemit-friends, lovers of art and the politically incorrect:

Once again it makes me happy to thank @juliakponsford for conceiving and curating an interesting contest like is Art Explosion, whose rules are here. If I'm not mistaken, it is the most important of the Visual Arts contests on the entire Steemit platform in terms of the power to convoke participants and in terms of prize amounts, very generous.

This week's theme, Sea Creatures, immediately inspired me to imagine the interior of the mind of a politician or public functionary, such as Mr. D.T. To imagine, and try to capture it through an image, the watery mind of a politician like D.T. I imagined it as a dark and dense sea with its radioactive and toxic dendrites generating bad ideas, bad things against the population. Their ideas are like voracious fishes and their words like jellyfish, slippery and so poisonous that they can kill people.

So that's what I tried to do with this drawing, actually a Digital Collage, which I titled The creatures of Mr. D.T.'s mental sea, and with which I participate in the ART EXPLOSION WEEK 52: whose theme is SEA CREATURES... There are 35 STEEM waiting!

Well, you may have heard me say that I am not a professional illustrator but an improvised amateur. So don't expect a big explanation, technically speaking, on how I got to the result I share with you today. I will only briefly describe the steps through which I arrived at the final finish of my Digital College. But I will try:

The creatures of Mr. D.T.'s mental sea STEP BY STEP

I did this little exercise of artistic exploration with the free software FireAlpaca, using all its great stock of tools which is available for free.

As a starting point, I processed the image of a connection of dendrites inside a human brain, on which I would intercalate several images of the seabed, abyssal fish and jellyfish: Here is the original image opened with FireAlpaca, which was taken from

With a lot of patience I was removing the blue background with the intention of staying alone with the image of the neural connection mounted on a transparency. I altered the original colors by phosphorescent greens to give an idea of toxicity.

Then I downloaded and edited with FireAlpaca the ghostly image of a jungle of sargasso seen from the bottom of the sea. This image did not suffer major modifications because I was interested in it as the Collage support. I took this image from

I then downloaded a series of images of beings living in the great depths of the sea. I found them at Of the fishes of the Abyssal Depths I was interested in the expression of wild ferocity and those long, sharp teeth.

All the images were cleaned of their background and their colors were very altered as can be seen in the following two images, as an example:

Original image.

Altered image.

The jellyfish. I love its transparency, its lightness to float, its elegance and its apparent delicacy. Its body reminds me of a wedding gown or a soap bubble. It is hard to imagine how painfully toxic it is to approach it and touch it. It's a good metaphor for how politicians' discourse works.

Finally I added the processed images of the fishes to create a 3D effect as if we were looking from the bottom of the sea towards its surface. With the option Airbrush I was spreading touches of color as to give homogeneity and some density to the Collage. In this way I gave the actual aspect to the work, as it appears at the beginning of this post.

If I have bothered any reader with my comments about the politicians, I apologize... In my defense I only ask that you imagine what a moderately decent Venezuelan can feel about politics and those who have done immense business with it.

I think it's important to comment, during my artwork I was traveling trought the Planet Claire listening: