Mermay!
It's Mermay, which I always tend to completely miss out on; last year I made a mermaid reskin of Imogen from Critical Role, which was fun enough but having to comply with an established design definitely made me feel pressured and killed any notion of looseness and flow.
This time around, though, I decided to kick off the month with a merman version of an OC, which gave me the freedom to just do whatever haha. I knew that I wanted him to feel distinguished and fancy, so I borrowed the fins of the betta fish, which I've always felt looked really beautiful and sort of serene. I also used this artwork as an excuse to finally start transitioning to Photoshop as my main software (sorry, Corel Painter), which also forced me to be more loose and experimental with my brushwork and shape design, so overall I'm pretty happy with how the process for this piece went :)
I also want to mention that I didn't forget to draw a forearm haha, this character is an amputee. In the future, I'd like to do more research into how residual limbs look and how missing a part of your body affects the musculature around it; I know that I should've made his left arm and pec far less buff, but this is an issue to be tackled at a later date.
I'm hoping to paint another OC as a merman soon, this time designed to be kind of like an orca (thank you Noova if you're reading this). Excited to explore more aggressive and sharp design language, with hopefully better Photoshops skills to match the concept haha.
This time around, though, I decided to kick off the month with a merman version of an OC, which gave me the freedom to just do whatever haha. I knew that I wanted him to feel distinguished and fancy, so I borrowed the fins of the betta fish, which I've always felt looked really beautiful and sort of serene. I also used this artwork as an excuse to finally start transitioning to Photoshop as my main software (sorry, Corel Painter), which also forced me to be more loose and experimental with my brushwork and shape design, so overall I'm pretty happy with how the process for this piece went :)
I also want to mention that I didn't forget to draw a forearm haha, this character is an amputee. In the future, I'd like to do more research into how residual limbs look and how missing a part of your body affects the musculature around it; I know that I should've made his left arm and pec far less buff, but this is an issue to be tackled at a later date.
I'm hoping to paint another OC as a merman soon, this time designed to be kind of like an orca (thank you Noova if you're reading this). Excited to explore more aggressive and sharp design language, with hopefully better Photoshops skills to match the concept haha.
mermay
art
digitalart
