Portrait of a Mermaid by Daniel Grant Newton

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Hey friend,

Hope you've been good. I have just come back from a lovely stay at the beach, and for some reason when I'm there, my imagination runs wild.

For example, I look at the pelicans and think they absolutely must really be aliens planning an invasion.  I see two side by side and I imagine this conversation.

Pelican 1: "I cannot wait for the mothership to arrive. These humans have no intellect like ours, but they are good with rudimentary tools. They will make fantastic slaves."

Pelican 2: "Zorg, you are not seriously still talking about the invasion. It has been thousands upon thousands of years, just accept it - we have been abandoned."

Pelican 1: "That is preposterous, Gidmmel! We are the finest of the royal scouts. The king clearly feels that we must spend more time in surveillance mode."

Pelican 2: "They are not coming. The king mustn't have forgiven us for using the wrong setting when we were terraforming Mars. This mission was a ruse to punish us for our mistake."

Pelican 1: "Why not instead of being such a wet beak you continue noting the humans and looking for their weaknesses, hey? For example, look how they come and lay on the beach soaking up the sunlight. They are clearly solar powered. Block out the sun, then they all fall onto those bed things, and it is all too easy."

Pelican 2: "Maybe you are right, but it would have made sense to have invaded this planet long before they had discovered electricity and gunpowder. I'm getting impatient with this mission."

Pelican 1: "Oh look, one of the humans is going to share some of his greasy salty potato bounty, let us beat the seagulls there! Quick."

Waddle waddle... And that is pretty much what I think is going down in pelican language.

And at night, looking at the stars and the water, I can just imagine a mermaid surfacing. So I thought I'd sketch a picture of one such mermaid that I imagined agreed to be my model in the moonlight, before submerging to never be seen again.

Although the authenticity of this image is debatable: if you're gullible, then yes, this pic is actually real, and the only real portrait of a mermaid in the world... and if you're not gullible, then by real, I mean not real.

Hope you like it!

- Daniel 

'Portrait of a Mermaid' by Daniel Grant Newton