Mermaid City

I have to say I had so much fun working on this illustration

that I could do a whole children's book on the story! haha

Yes, you can believe your eyes...this IS the MERMAID illustration! haha. So is it worth the wait? I spent 13.5 hours painting today to get this done...so it BETTER be worth it. (Haaaaaaand Craaaaaamp! X_x )

As a general announcement this will be the last full illustration for my summer program. Fear not loyal readers, I plan to complete at least 5 more pencil/sketch illustrations before the summer ends. Plus my last semester starts in a few weeks and by then I will have another heavy illustration program in place.

This illustration took about 3 weeks to complete. I am glad I took this long because it gave me the chance to do it right. At one point I hit a MAJOR roadblock...it was so bad that I couldn't even lift my hand to paint...no motivation! I overcame this issue by simply plunging in headfirst. No special formula to success. I have since discovered that I have the must fun during the planning/sketching/value-color comps stage and the FREE-PAINTING stage (which is just me, my brush and the canvas. The point in the painting where I do not need reference matieral, sketches, etc.) My problem occurred because I got stuck too long in the part in-between those two stages. (preparing what I call my "underpainting").

The key to this illustrations success is:

1.A solid SOLID sketch.

2.SEVERAL full-value exploring studies

3.A few different color studies.

I hardly used any reference for this illustration. Most the reference photos were used during the sketch stage. Hence the SOLID sketch I had!