A Severed Subsea Cable

We were at the beach earlier this fall at Pt. Woronzof in Anchorage and came across a rather thick cable sticking out of the water.

Here we see a thick braided copper cable with a flexible polymer insulation layer and an outer jacket. My guess is that this cable carried power over to Fire Island at one point in time.

Then kids started throwing rocks at the piece of cable sticking out of the water and I managed to capture one splash right at the base of the thing… and I imagined it like a worm coming out of the water… because I really like Dune.

This inspired the following conceptual illustration that started out as a picture of my kid sitting on a rock.

I decided to draw my kid on top of the severed cable instead and I thought that looked cool.

Below is a short animation of my coloring process.