Mechanical Pencil - Tumblr Posts

Mermay #03 - Ithiel as a Mertaur/Hippocamptaur My centauress Ithiel as a hippocamptaur! XD I missed Mermay yesterday so I’m uploading this as a buffer. Behold, Mermay #03!

Well... my random fish generator keeps giving me eels O.o Go figure. Day 1 it just gave me eel so I went with green moray, but this time it gave me European Eel. XD So here it is. But one of the things that haunted me when I gave this one fish lips was the eerie resemblance to Pepe the frog... but screenshotting the WIP and showing it to my friends I decided by their reactions maybe the resemblence wasn’t that much of an issue. XD So I kept drawing and here it is. Technically I reffed a scientific drawing of one instead of a photo, but the drawing version inspired me more so I went with it. XD So. Here’s this monstrosity XDD

Mermay #05 - Narwhal Reverse Mer After the random fish generator gave me a third eel in a row, I knew it was time for a change. So after being bombarded with suggestions from friends I went with the one that inspired me the most- a narwhal mer. And well, it wasn’t meant to be a reverse mer originally, but my thought process went something like this was I was drawing: *sketch sketch* Okay I’ve finally got an idea of what I’m doing. I’ll make the head kind of anthropomorphic narwhal, and... wait what’s happening. No this is an anthropomorphic narwhal I need there to be a human aspect still for it to be considered a mer--*starts drawing legs* ....this is turning into a reverse mer. I blame @enjoliquej this is all her fault. SHE STARTED THE REVERSE MER TREND. BLAME HER FOR BRINGING ME DOWN TO HER DANK LEVEL.

Mermay #06 - Ollinder Somebody said do a beluga mer and guess who popped up. XD Originally from @cielarose‘s squadron of mers, Ollinder was handed off to me after the disbandment of an old threeway project called Sol. Now he floats around awaiting a potential revamp and story update whenever the heck my brain gets around to it. XD Usually he’s just a humanoid with belaga-esque features and skin coloration, but it’s Mermay, so I decided to do him as a proper mer. I did him during Mermay last year as a small thing, and now he’s shown up again for this year’s Mermay. XD He’s really fun to draw though. My first couple sketches of him came out pretty effortlessly. I redrew this one a couple times because the pose was giving me issues, but other than that he was fun to draw and fun to color. XD I would have touched it up more, but my eyes are closing and I’m officially two days behind Mermay as of this writing. XD I was going to slap some buffer sketches up on tumblr to compensate but I never got around to it, so. I dunno. We’ll see if I get caught up or just resort to using a few sketches from my buffer stash.

Mermay #07 - Swordfish Mer Usually swordfish are depicted blue but I found a picture of one that was brown so I kinda went for it. Was fun busting out my markers and paint for this one. XD

Mermay #08 - Alex This here is a betta mer I adopted from CC (original design here). Once he was trained to fight in a betta mer arena. He escaped, and is trying to live a normal life now. Of course when other mers come along trying to befriend him, that makes things challenging, giving his propensity to attack other mers on sight thanks to his training. This picture was probably from when he was still forced to fight into the arena. He was still terrified, even back then. XD

Mermay #10 - Remus the Betta Mer

This here’s Remus, a hyperactive bundle of joy owned by my friend CC. This here mer can hardly stay still and tendstotalklikethis which makes his dialogue a bit hard to decode at times. XD But all the same he’s got a really fun design and was both a hassle and a joy to render out traditionally XD Definitely learning more about how to blend my markers better. Seems like lighter colors tend to blend darker colors better, especially when placed on a darkish midtone so you won’t really be able to see your mistakes as well. XD That or the baby blue copic marker I got for my birthday just rocks at everything. There’s that too. XD but my indigo blue prisma’s kinda tricky to work with so it’s good those two work well together at least. But anyways I’m rambling. XD; Enjoy the mer.

Mermay #11 - Eli Another CC request, because she has mers and I’m open to ideas for Mermay XD He was really simple and nice to marker out. I think I only used... I wanna say four? Four colors? For this whole thing? Blue, two shades of green... no, five total colors. Blue, two shades of green (though it was mostly just one shade), skin color, and cool gray for the shirt. Any colors other than that were probably caused by darkening/lighting the pic in Photoshop. But anyways... So yeah he was a fun and simple mer to draw. I’m a day behind in Mermay now (or actually two since it’s the 13th already?) because I procrastinated on this one and chose movie screenshot drawing instead over Mermay, but I’ll see if I can’t get caught up again today or tomorrow XD;

Mermay #12 - North American Darter Fish Tried the random fish generator again and after a couple dozen tries I found this lovely kind of fish XD I just had to make a mer out of it for Mermay!

Mermay #13 - Mahi-mahi Mer Another day, another mer! Here’s a mahi-mahi mer who looks quite grumpy XD Not that mahi-mahi have fangs like that, but I thought it fit the persona. XD

Mermay #14 - Blue Ribbon Eel Mer Sooo I really went all out with this one. I think I shopped it too much even... XD But uh. Yeah. And I decided too to upload a bunch of other junk with it. Like a process gif (seen those here on tumblr and thought it was a great idea XD), a line, color and final version of it kinda show the progression better. Was thinking about how portfolio people like to see your process and I thought maybe tumblr people might like to see my process too so... why not? XD So yeah I usually don’t edit this much in Photoshop when I’m working traditional but I got carried away and really rendered this one out XD; It’s still got heavy traces of the traditional like that tail bit I forgot to fill in... looked nice on paper but horrible in digital. XD But what was I going to say... Right blue ribbon eels are fun. Did the generator again and after a couple dozen tries it gave me ribbon eel and though I’d sworn off eels after it gave me three in a row, the blue ribbon eel mer was way too cool to pass up. I had to change up the tail from the very early WIP (yeah, the blurry photo that’ll take you almost a minute to see for 5 seconds in the process gif if you missed it) because the way it was configured had it backwards, but I managed to get it so I could keep the pose and not have the tail be as weird... Frankly it still looks kinda wonky if I compare it to the first WIP picture and I do like the silhouette just a little bit better from that one. Was clearer and more fluid and a little less squashed-looking at the bottom. But what was I gonna say... Oh yeah and I apologize if some of the process shots in the gif are kinda blinding... I really pumped up the colors way too much at first and kept trying to downplay it. Even now it looks tolerable but before yeah it was kinda blinding XD; Anyways uh yeah. Sooo that’s the deal. I think I was going to say something else but I don’t remember and it’s late. I think I’m just gonna submit this and call it good... I think I was going to try to explain my process more instead of just babbling on... Don’t know if I accomplished that, but I guess it’s pretty straightforward. Sketch, line with pencil, sometimes I render it a bit with pencil too, then I color it which can be more finished and polished from traditional or less so like in this one where it’s nearly a flat color. Then I use photoshop to adjust colors, fix mistakes, erase smudges or color bleeds from previous pages, maybe fix spacing issues with the eyes, etc etc and to heighten the contrast between my light and shadow areas. Usually it’s minor if I’ve already rendered it out well traditionally, but this time I was pretty heavy-handed with PS because I don’t trust my blue markers that much to give me the right color... My baby blue copic is sometimes the only one that works reliably, so I worked exclusively with my baby blue copic and a cheap crayola yellow marker to produce the traditional color draft. I started out small working in photoshop, just darkening my shadows and lightening my highlights, but then I got carried away because it didn’t look like the proper shade of blue... And that’s when chaos ensued. XD It took me practically the whole day to do this pic and hours in photoshop to get the final product. I would have worked longer on it probably too if it wasn’t super late. But anyways. Sooo that’s the deal. I could probably go into more detail about the use of color balance, adjustments, brush settings and yada yada yada but it’s really late and I keep rambling. So before I type anything else that probably won’t even be read by the casual tumblr scroller I’m just gonna submit this already, put in my tags and get it over with. Or well tags first, then the submitting... You get the point. XP

Mermay #16 - Max Another belated request from CC, Max looking completely done with everything. XD Because that’s his norm.

Mermay #17 - Tirak the Great White Shark Mer I didn’t bother coloring this one because... he’s gray white and black so being all grayscale it just felt like extra hassle to marker it up. Might’ve looked nicer that way, but alas. So here’s Tirak, a shark mer from an RP I did a few years back who’s still kicking around doing his own thing in the mini-world I made up for him. He spends most of his time inventing elaborate traps to catch fish with and chilling on his own. At least until he runs into some other folks and things start to get interesting. Then he’s figuring out how to weaponize his traps to stop people from trying to hurt the unlikely bunch of misfit pals he’s collected. And that’s Tirak for you. XD

Mermay #18 - Dottyback Mer Been hanging onto a google search of one of these guys for a while. So I decided to draw one up quickly to post after last night’s pic. She was surprisingly fast to make... I couldn’t have taken more than 30 minutes start to finish to produce this. Probably more like 10-20 just to make her. Felt like less than that for sure. XD So here’s a little Dottyback mer. Three behind still... gotta keep truckin! XP

Mermay #19 - Blind Cavefish Mer “Light? I’ve never heard of light before... What’s it like?” So after the random fish generator gave me blind cavefish after a couple of tries, I looked up what they looked like I came up with a sad headcanon for a mer... That’s where this guy’s from. XD

Mermay #20 - Hakee Second in the series of old characters from a mer RP, there’s this thing. From the same tribe as Tirak, a small girl about the age of six who is an albino shark mer and wanders about like a ghost. They say she’s an outcast, but she gets along fairly well for her status.

Mermay #21 - Kitch as a mer So on a different theme, today I decided to draw as a mer a random alien side-side character who (almost) no one on tumblr will recognize. XD I thought doing chars from my Aliens series as mers would be fun, so here’s one XD Not even a main she’s like a side of a side character who comes in with a bunch of other random characters who temporarily travel with the mains after being rescued from a slave ship, but she’s fun sometimes and I realized she reaaally needed an update... not that she’s a mer ordinarily, but you know. XD Her ears got a lot longer from her first ref... (ugh ew this art is four years old now don’t click the link EAE okay well maybe click it but be warned this is ancient) And who could resist a minor catfish theme to her mer design since she’s a feline-based alien? XD Anyways... so this was a fun quick thing to do. I know I’m all over the place with themes, but I’m just trying to keep my inspiration up so I can get caught up >.>;; Almost caught up though! Just one more to go and I’ll be caught up to current day XD;

Mermay #22 - Tsuname as a Mer Finally, all caught up! Well, here’s a crowd favorite XD Tsuname, as a mer! I know his species is technically mermaid-like, but I thought I’d draw him as a traditional mer for fun. I would have colored, but I reaaaally wanted to get caught up. XD; So I left is as is in pencil sketch form!

Mermay #24 - McCosker’s Wrasse Mer So this time I didn’t feel like doing the twiggy lady mers I usually draw and designed to make this one a little more beefier, if only in the arms. XD; ...and outfit came out kinda punk-rockish so that too. Although... upon further research into wrasses I found out the design I chose was for a male one... I should have figured with the colors, since in nature usually the males are a lot more colorful XD; But alas. I dunno it’s just patterning though and she’s a mer so maybe it’s different for mermaids? I dunno. Anyways, that embarrassment aside, here’s a mer. XD

Mermay #25 - Brittani Mer Another one from the same band of misfit mers as Finny, this is Brittani. She has Amazon boto and gray seal markings ordinarily, but here’s her as an actual mer because it’s Mermay. XD She was fun to do. I’m glad her shirt came out pretty well too, considering I made it blue at first and then changed it back to her more iconic purple. XD