Euphy [Mermay 2024]

Hello everyone! I am back with a late entry of Mermay 2024. I've been gone for about 2 months because of the sudden announcement that we'll be having a mock board exam last March, I had to stop chilling and focus on studying 'cuz it was said we couldn't graduate if we failed the mock board exam. After that was a series of other exams semi-finals and finals that's why, except for short studies on art to get in touch with my stylus, this is my first fully drawn art after 2 months.

Art Process

I started with a sketch and while at it I roughly painted it in greyscale to test out where it would be good to place the light source, and once I've decided on it I then proceeded with the lineart.

Here I first painted the base colors with just the body because I had a different plan for rendering the hair later, but I still drew just a silhouette of it because it creeps me up seeing a bald mermaid XD. Going back to the process, after the base color, I added an ambient shadow for the whole body, at this moment I was trying out what could be good, a cool shadow and a warm light or a warm shadow and a cool light and it turned out the latter is better. I used an airbrush to paint the part where the light would hit and used a lasso tool to erase the parts that should be in the shadows. I then added a secondary light which is only visible in the shadows.

After adding the lights, I moved on to adding the occlusion shadows to give a sense of depth, they are the darkest shadows created when certain parts are close to each other. I then painted the hair (my favorite part) I used various brushes to paint like it was flowing under the water but to avoid getting out of hand and overdoing it I first painted a general shape of the hair and used it as a guide. I added more details, highlights, and some objects on the background and the result is.....

The other reason I pushed to make this entry despite being late is because this art challenge shows how much my art progressed throughout the years. Whether I improve or not haha it motivates me to study and practice more. These are my entries on the past years...