Going under the sea felt like a natural step for the next Tango coloring book. Some of the earliest pages didn't involve the bathysphere that would become part of most of the pages in the final product.

It's inclusion was a solution to the problem where I couldn't harm Tango, but I wanted to show the danger and scale of some of these creatures. The best example is the giant squid. The first sketch wasn't dynamic, interesting, and the scale didn't hit me. The bathysphere let me show the power and size of the giant squid, without harming Tango in some graphic way.

The bathysphere gave me other opportunities to have Tango meet animals in more helpful ways like the electric eel. By this point I had Tango stung, terrified, and hunted by a great white shark so electrocuting him felt cruel.

One point I wanted to make sure I hit before I finished the book was to have Tango meet an anatomically correct octopus. Tango was created with only four tentacles and I always wondered if people thought I was an idiot for not grasping the basic concept of an octopus.

The color along video was a clear choice for me after saw one day in a mechanics shop that "Shark Week" was indeed still a thing. Again I couldn't hurt Tango, but I could make him ink himself.