Do inverted mermaids (fishes with legs) count?
EDIT: Here's a WIP portrait I may or may not finish... The background color may or may not become an actual background.

The first pallete is awesome!

I made progress. I changed my mind on the overall coloring of the merperson, though.

I love the color purple :D

More progress:

It's going well so far. But I need some tips on the head fin...
I've tried something, but I'm not sure if I should keep going with the line texture thing. Help?

upd.

here's an idea Eggy, hope it's for some help.

I like it better too cept she's very tight and vertical. Can she be more curvy in line not shape?

Hi Eggy. Sorry if I went too far with the edit but here it is



For your question - you can do with the fin anything you feel looks good - if you google bat wings, lizard, dragon or fish fins you can find a lot of options.

But don't go too far with contrast/colors. Concentrate on the shape of clusters, bc this is what makes any texture look good and somewhat realistic in my opinion. Overtexturing with low color count is one of the worse things you can do.

So here are the steps for improving your piece which I tried to apply in the head edit:

1) fix your light source.
2) fix head shape
3) flatten the scale texture and add some breaks. This one is optional and depends of what you're trying to achieve. Personally I find evenly textured head to look somewhat boring and lacking readability. Sometimes it needs just a little bit of texture here and there to make the whole shape look textured.

Hope that helps. Eyes are really well done!

Instead of "standing" she could be perched onto something, giving her body a line not parallel to the frame, dynamic body line, and by propping herself up the arms are given something to do, tail can still be curved and what not.

Just a thought, this iconic image immediately comes to mind.

I'm blown away by the quality of all these wips and entries. Amazing stuff.

Wow lots of incredible work!

Mine is a far simpler approach, Im working on adding gills, some shading to the top and fixing the legs. But im fairly happy with it so far.

What you think? Still thinking is too much noise.

Finished and posted. :)

It says "Animation - Optional"
That means animation is allowed, but not required.

Work in progress from me too:

Finally had some free time to start on this weekly, hopefully I can get it done over the weekend in time for the contest.

A play on the the gender role reversals in the seahorse reproductive process.

Your art is still in WIP stage and not yet pixelart.
This is the reason it was sent back.
Review the pinned threads in the sticky read link on my sig