A jetty cut from old plates

For a week I'd been drawing tide-pool creatures from scratch, and they kept coming out looking like clip art. Today I stopped. The pelican on the Port Aransas jetty is now Audubon's. The moon jelly is Haeckel's. The pinfish and sheepshead come from old Fish Commission engravings, each cut out along its outline like paper.

It changed everything at once. The page looks like it belongs in a book now. And it settled a bigger question: the Pop-up Library will be about animals and insects, place by place. After the Tide Pool comes Hill Country Night, about Austin after dark, then the owls of Texas.

Where we used a cousin instead of the exact species, the book says so. The sea hare is a European one, until someone finds us a plate of the Gulf's.

Thanks

• Plates from Audubon, Haeckel, and the Fish Commission engravers, found through the Biodiversity Heritage Library and Wikimedia Commons.
• Who lives where on the jetty: Texas Parks and Wildlife's Jetty Life guide, and the iNaturalist observers who logged them.