Mermaid @ MindSay

After working a long while (about two weeks) on this painting, I began to see the Betta Mermaid as a Merman and, in my mind as I tried to sleep, I keep seeing a few different female versions of a Siamese Fighting Fish-maid.  The name that comes to mind is that this "guy" is Abernathy.  I've always liked that name.  Sounds antique and nautical to me, like he was discovered in an old sea coastal town...

When we last left our buddy, Abernathy, this is how he looked:


Sometimes, in order to finish a really good painting, you have to stop work on it and just stare at it for awhile.  After that while, I realized that the scales should appear more translucent. Normally I don't use a lot of white watercolor, I usually just erase color with water, but since I put a lot of dark color on his scales, a washing out would overall give a more gray lavender sheen underneath the scales. So here is the result:


Here's a close-up of the detail I put in his mysterious eyes:

Can you see how he has started to seem more male in personality and appearance? I love how character develops like that. Start with a few strokes of the brush and pencil lines and soon someone you didn't expect at first appears!

Here is where I started to become more and more satisfied with the appearance of the scales. This was the moment I came to know the figure as "Abernathy" and started to fall in love with him.

What would you do if you encountered this Merman? Doesn't he look fierce?

To show you the scale of the painting, I took a photo of Mr. Snuggles carefully stepping around my drawing board.

To check my detail, I often take a photo of a painting in black and white. I also, if I have enough time and computer access, scan in the painting, invert the colors, and/or reverse it to see how it would look in a book. I do this not just to gauge a different perspective, but to see if I got anything in improper perspective. Then it's back to refining the image.

I don't think Abernathy would be totally alone in his tank, so as I began to detail the bubbles in the water and background, I lifted some color with water to allow some space for a few new watery friends...

Enter a goldfish and a guppy! Now we can really see how small (or is that how big?) Abernathy really is. Considering the size of the other fish, I now see him as being almost as big as a kitten.

And now we are nearly done with the painting. The goldfish and guppy (someone wanna come up with some names for them?) are more detailed and Abernathy is looking more and more pleased with himself. I imagine a male Betta merman would be kind of like a peacock -- not necessarily conceited, but happy being the only one of his kind and secure knowing that he is the most beautiful thing in his world.

If you are keen to notice, our Abernathy is ready to mate. He has begun to build a nest of bubbles at the surface of the tank. He doesn't know yet if there are any female Betta mermaids to be found, but he's willing to send out a mating call into the universe.

From close-up you can see a slight smile on Abernathy's face. Maybe all he needs is you?

Wait and see.

The first two images are a bit cloudy and dark because I didn't have a good bright light source to show the pencil drawings in detail, but it should give you an idea what direction I was going to work into...

I've been working, slowly, on a painting of a Betta Mermaid.  Here's how she's been coming into view:

The first color wash above.

Second color wash. The paper is still wet here.

Let dry, then I worked in more detail, including some color on the shell and foliage around the figure. Imagine that the Betta Mermaid is quite small. The shell is most likely from a snail. She holds onto it near the top of a tank or glass bowl.

A close up of the mermaid's face. Her personality is showing!

Another detailed close-up of the mermaid.

And here she gets her scales and fins detailed! I used wet on dry color for this part of the process.

Another close up. I like how the water reflected the light from the flash. It gave me an idea on how to bring out her eyes.
There will be more to come soon. The painting is developing beautifully!

Ok so The Little Mermaid is a classic, right? Well Disney, being the money hungry assholes they are, decided to make a straight to DVD movie called "Ariel's Beginning" or something like that. Like seriously, wtf?!?! It was bad enough they made a Mulan II that was only about being against arranged marriages, had shitty songs, and Mulan was breaking even more gender roles but kinda in shitty non-Chinese ways. Oh and then awhile ago they had 2 more sequels to Beauty and the Beast. I only saw one and it was Christmas themed, with the motto being that hope is the greatest gift to receive and Paul Reubens the dude from Pee Wee's Playhouse was the voice for a musical instrument. (Yay run-on sentences!)

Anyhoo the point is Disney keeps fucking with classics and I'm sick of it. I mean i believe this is the third sequel to The Little Mermaid. They made that awful second movie where Ariel has a daughter, and of course it sucked. Hey Disney, stop slamming the head of good ideas against the wall till it explodes and leaves blood anywhere and no one remembers what the head looked like in the first place because its so nasty no one wants to watch it.

I woke up from a dream where I had a genetic mutation that made me have a mermaid tail instead of legs. In the dream my brother and sister were also mer-people, although it had nothing to do with being in the water.

But I dreamed it so intensely and vividly that about an hour after I woke up, I was puzzling over why my conviction that I had a tail didn't fit in anywhere with my other childhood memories or photos of me as a child, and I kept on touching my legs to see that, yes they were legs, not a tail.

Then the hour after that, I spent the time thinking about how I could turn this into a story.

hiyah!!

 

I really like Pichi pichi pitch(mermaid melody)

I'm so hooked to it...

I really love it^_^

and so other animes!!

 

dammit!!;>