My first project here

Nice, thanks. I like your idea of pouring water over herself. Quite like the venom suggestion too, it was lurking in the back of my head but thankfully you've brought it out. Will have to doodle more.

So here's where I'm at. I've abandoned the transformation idea for now as I have a rough image in my head that I want and it'll be just about impossible to get the right result using the construction I have in mind. So I'm going to stick with my original mermaid idea and try to concentrate on doing it well. I put my last piece on the wall and I want this one to be as good, so here goes. Final concept should look something like this:



More comments welcome, I'll start the drawing tomorrow probably.

I think you might want to be careful about how your posing her tail. Or it migt just be a me-thing. I'm not particularly fond of mermaids with their tail fin sticking out in front of them like they were sitting with straight legs. But maybe others are. Anyway I'd suggest something like the below (though my quick sketch doesn't look too good either)



Come to think of it, if you'd still want a transformation theme the straight legs might be logical. I still think it looks a bit odd, though.

Thanks, that helps, I think I'll put her tail behind her right arm too. That will be easier to pose as it makes more sense physically I think. Sketch starting tomorrow. (excited, nervous, apprehensive etc. Not done much drawing since early in the year thanks to outside pressures!)

Wish me luck!

Good luck
(and yes I think it's good to put her tail behind her arms - I only drew the full lines to show where it was... and also to do something fast)

Thanks, I appreciate it, I'll let you know how I get on tomorrow. Force me through this!

So I've done a lineart to get the very basic proportions right. Please comment on it so I can move on to start colouring and not worry about having to bodge stuff together down the line.



Also, when you mask paintings, how do you cope with anti-aliasing? I've not really done masks before but thinking about trying it out this time, but struggling with it. Any suggestions?

Are you working in Photoshop? If so the creating clipping masks would probably be the best way to go. That way you can have whatever kind of edge you like so it can be soft or hard wherever you want and just generally works quite well. It's possibly worth locking the base layer once it's made so you don't accidentally change the silhouette when you want to be shading..

Basically you draw the silhouette of the character first, making sure the brush is set to the opacity you want. In your case you'll want if fully opaque unless you plan on making her semi-translucent..

Once you've done that create a new layer above it and right click on it, this should bring up a menu with the option to Create Clipping Mask. Once you do this a little arrow should be in the layers menu pointing to the layer below as I've circled.

I'd then go about painting in your values and colour with as many layers as you want just keep making each new layer a clipping mask and it will only affect the area defined by the layer at the bottom of the list of those little black arrows.

In the example I made here I brushed out a little shape then duplicated it so you can see what I started with. Then created one clipping mask to do the values and then a second, set to colour, for the colours..

If anything doesn't make any sense here then feel free to ask and I'll try to clarify

I think her breasts are too high. They should be a full head's distance from her chin. Not that she needs to be pendulous or anything, but they should be lower than they are.

Getting the surf right is going to be tricky with this one Stu. I am looking forward to seeing this develop!

Thanks for the comments, I'm using Photoshop 7.0 so I can't see that option, but I'll keep playing around and trying to find something that approximates it.

Dom, I've adjusted it a bit, but don't forget the angle of her body is pulling the breast down and away from the body, and the view angle actually makes it look like it's closer to the head I think. What do you think now?