ART EXPLOSION WEEK 42: NO THEME | Purple Mermaid (An Entry)

First of all I wanna thank Hive account@juliakponsford for a great opportunity, another contest that would challenge artists of steemit to explore their imaginations. Click here to view her post.

This is my entry:

This week's Art Explosion Contest has no theme. And because of that, I decided to do a portrait of a mermaid because for now, drawing and painting portraits is my comfort zone. This is an artwork inspired by the works of various artists that I followed on instagram. I always see mermaid art posts on my instagram feed and I just love them because they are just so magical to look at at.

Materials

All photos are mine and I used my Oppo A37 in taking these pictures. And the materials that I used were:
✔️ Pentel Arts Color Pencils
✔️ White Pen
✔️ Water
✔️ Tissue
✔️ Watercolor set
✔️ Paintbrushes
✔️ Eraser
✔️ HB Staedtler pencil
✔️ Berkeley watercolor pad
✔️ 0.3 Dong-A Fine Tech Pen

Process

I did the sketch. At first I was trying to do a whole body drawing of a mermaid but when I finished painting it, I didn't like how it turned out. So I drew a new one, now it's a close up portrait.

Then I applied base colors on her hair and skin...

... and brows, cheeks, and lips. After that, I applied another layer of watercolor on her hair and I did some detailing on her skin, where the shadows should be at.

Then I applied color to her eyes. I then continued layering colors on her hair. The funny thing is that I forgot to draw her left ear. I think you noticed. But still I found a way to paint her left ear later on. Her ears were supposed to be of the same color as her skin but when I painted her left ear of course the color wouldn't be the same as in her right ear.

So I darkened her right ear. The next thing I did was adding the other important details such as her lashes, brows, colors on her lids, lips, and scales using color pencils. But before I drew her scales, I painted watercolor first. I also applied color to her pendant. And then I did some line art using a 0.3 Fine Tech Pen.

Then a few addition of dark colors on the shadows, highlighting, and background painting, and I'm done.

GIF of the process

^{I made this GIF in giphy.com. Link to my GIF in giphy.}

Final Product

^{This photo was edited using Adobe Lightroom CC}

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.