S is for Sunflower Sea Star – Uncommon Animals of the Alphabet

The sunflower sea star is one of the largest sea stars on Earth, capable of growing up to a metre across, moving with eerie speed along the ocean floor on thousands of tiny tube feet. It is not a passive ornament. It is a hunter. It keeps sea urchin populations in balance, which in turn protects kelp forests. And kelp forests are underwater cities. They are nurseries, shelter, oxygen factories, and entire universes of interdependent life.

In this illustration, I didn’t want to draw a perfect specimen. That would have been dishonest. Instead, I leaned into a subtle tension between beauty and unease. The limbs stretch and curl in slightly unnatural ways. There is a sense of looseness. Gravity doesn’t quite apply. The form feels both alive and unstable, like it exists in that fragile moment between thriving and dissolving. The dripping textures hint at this underlying vulnerability. Not in a grotesque way, but in a truthful one. Because that is where we are now. Living in the era of almost gone.

Share one of the best gifts you’ve ever received.

My favourite gift as a kid was a red ghetto blaster. Cheap plastic and more powerful than anything else I owned. It taught me that you could capture invisible things and keep them. Songs. Voices. Moods and creativity. Proof that feeling something was not a waste of time.

I sat there drawing while it played, quietly building a life no adult around me could see or understand. They thought it was just noise. It was actually the start of my compulsive creativity.