I was fascinated by the jewel beetle’s iridescent, metallic colors, which are created not by pigment but by microscopic structures that interact with light. I took that already unusual appearance and pushed it somewhere deliberately biologically inaccurate, replacing the beetle’s interior with the cross-section of a lime.
Slice Me was also a technical challenge. I wanted to bring several very different surfaces into one surreal composition: the beetle’s shimmering exoskeleton, sharp steel, the intricate knife handle, and the juicy translucence of the lime. It became an exercise in seeing how far I could push texture and material in Procreate while keeping the image believable enough to make its impossibility feel strangely plausible.
