CGAN May 2021 - Underwater WIPs

Underwater

Brief: Because May is Mermay and at least two of us are looking forward to the official release of Subnautica Below Zero, in May, this month's challenge theme is UNDERWATER. As Banj usually says, take the title and interpret it into a masterpiece of art

Deadline: Monday the 31st of May at midnight (UTC).

This thread is where you post your WIPs (work in progress), final entries should be posted over here:
cgartnexus.com/index.php/forums/current-...21-underwater-finals

Challenge rules and guidelines:
cgartnexus.com/index.php/forums/challeng...s/39-challenge-rules

Rules in brief:
- All challenge entries must be your own work.
- You should post at least two WIP images that are clearly different from your final entry and each other.
- Your final entry should contain your image (inserted so it shows up full size) and at least two links to your WIP posts on the forum.
- No chatter in the finals thread – if you have questions, post them in the WIP thread or PM an admin.
- Feedback is allowed & encouraged together with the voting and in the WIP thread.
- Deadline is given in UK time (midnight UTC) with a grace period of 5 minutes for getting the post sorted.
- Each member may cast one vote.
- No cheating! Admins may decide to disqualify an entry that does not adhere to the above rules.

Water people going to do for this challenge I wonder?

Only now noticed the pun in there....

Also... I was looking at mermay mermaids at instagram and I misread one of them as being a derp sea mermaid. Now I have to figure out what one of those would look like. Might be my challenge, this month... Or not.

Well, I started something today....



...and then gradually realised...



...that I don't know how to draw jellyfish.




May continue. May restart. May do something else that doesn't have jellyfish.

So you May.
Jelly fish are cool though. Use references!

Little submarines are hard to draw too.
I tried a more detailed redesign today and it looked rather foolish.

More references!

And while everyone else is playing underwater I'll try to keep painting it.

I had a hard time deciding on something this month, and when I finally did, I settled for an ordinary mermaid. It's mermay, after all... but I just wasn't feeling it, and after watching those anime series on Netflix, I wanted to give the mermaid some dragon features, like horns, maybe wings. And somewhere along the way it seems I lost the mermaid altogether...






EDIT: I should mention that I do want to colour it but having worked in mainly monochrome I'm not sure how I'll go about that without it looking awful :p

That looks great and a very imaginative design too.
Can't wait to see that colour!

well "that colour" might end up all bluish.
Been playing around a bit with that and the background. I rather liked the stripeyness* of the background at first but I'm not sure it works with other bits of the image (such as the light rays from the surface)...



*I'm not sure how to spell this. No matter which way I change it, my spellchecker suggests "stroppiness" but I'm pretty sure that's not what I'm talking about...