I used to work at Puerto Rico Sea Grant as a web and graphic designer and I really enjoyed what I was doing there. My job offered me an opportunity to illustrate stories about nature and science while trying to make those stories appealing to a wider audience. This illustration was going to be used for a poster announcing a conference about endangered whales, dolphins, and porpoises and what people could do to protect them. In the end, the illustration was never used in the poster because the conference organizers wanted to pack so much information into the publication that I could barely fit any images.
The entire image was drawn and painted in Photoshop. I started with drawing the general shapes of the figures and then added the speckled background to use as a base for the painting. Then I went on to paint in the figures using transparent washes so that the background would show through and affect the colors of the final image.