Mermay

Hi there! I skipped a week, because I am scum, but I will endeavor to be less scummy in the future. In other news, Overwatch is a lot of fun. Seriously though onto the art!

So I saw a lot of great and talented posts throughout May, also known as Mermay (apparently), and I wanted to toss a little something in there myself so I painted this!

I have a couple of thoughts about the end result but the overall theme is that I feel like I could have amped up most of the features to really push this into something more special. I was really happy with the last minute choice to include some subtle bioluminescence coming off of her fins, but I could have pushed it more. I was happy with the scales and they weren’t as tedious as they looked which is good because the thought process behind them proceeded thusly…

*starts doing a small section*

“this better dramatically improve things, because this is boring”

*zooms out to check*

“shit. That looks waaaaaayyyy better*

The layering of the shading on the scales plus the overall effects of the light in general on her tail came together pretty well although greater attention could have been paid to the details. After this was completed I posted it to instagram and imgur and was really interested in the reception it received in both places.

I’ve recently been posting things to imgur just to sort of broaden my horizons a touch and man… It is rough out there. Instagram was great! This particular mermaid received many happy likes, and from a bunch of people I didn’t know! 33 likes is small potatoes for some people but for me it was one of my better received images, I felt good. Then I checked imgur. She did not do so well there at all by any standards, even by the standards of other stuff I had posted and I had interpreted this one as a lot more polished. Apparently, imgur does not like my take on polish. I’m interested to see how future posts perform on both image sharing sites but for now, instagram definitely likes me better.