Daughter of the Sea

I really enjoyed painting this piece. I am always amazed at how moving onto the photo shoot stage of an illustration brings the sketch to life through the model. To have a model that encompasses the total mood and look of the character that I am portraying is such a facinating thing. I wanted her to be secretive, tempting, alluring… to envelop some of the original ideas that I heard of mermaids in the old fairytales. So, from this photo I hope you can see how excited I was to get started on it.



I wanted the colors to be slightly muted and to be warm, as if she was not too deep into the ocean. I decided to use a cooler blue as my under painting to contrast with the warmer flesh tones (to create that muted feel…cool + warm) and also to pull through the entire painting and give the feeling that she was actually underwater. You can still see the color that I used for the under painting under her hair and her arm. I had not painted that area yet.



After the first layer of basic monochromatic color, I started to give the piece more life by adding detail and a color range closer to the desired result.



The final stage is always the most fun. I added the final highlights in order to push and pull objects throughout the composition and also rendered areas of greater importance.
So, in the end the final result is…