The Little Mermaid

A three-volume retelling built on two opposed colour worlds — the sunset surface and the sea witch’s cold cave — with Arya, Vega and Poseidon carried across all three.

3 volumes, 52 pages, all of them here — click any page to read it at size. I also produced the ElevenLabs voiceover for this title; that audio is not published here yet.

What was hard about this one

This one is a colour problem as much as a character problem. The surface pages run warm sunset; Vega’s cave runs cold blue-green; the story crosses between them repeatedly. Holding one cast steady while the entire palette swings underneath them is what made these the longest pages to settle.

Why the year matters

At the time, no mainstream image model could take a character and reliably produce that same character in a new pose. There was no character reference, no style lock, no consistent-character mode, and generated text was not clean enough to print — which is why every speech bubble here is typeset over the art rather than generated in it.

Today much of that is a solved problem. That is exactly why the work is dated: the interesting part is not that the pages are consistent, it is what consistency cost in 2025 — and that the pipeline built a year later for the Grade-5 science book can now measure that cost instead of quietly absorbing it.

Made at Wippi (Gen Alpha Kids First Media Tech), Bangalore.