SciFi and Fantasy Art: Signal

her arms are blurry

ohhhhhhh ignore the blurry arms thing, she's really sweet. Besides, i reckon that mermaids should be allowed a bit off "blur", seeing as they live underwater.

Oooh, cute and adventurous ^^
You should make a background, it's usually done before the character is colored, it then makes the selection of colors easier. I think you should worm on cleaning it up, sicne it's on layers, and adding a translucent outline.

I like the concept here. Looks nice. I generally work my way from back to front, too. At this point it looks like you need to start on shading and details on the mermaid, if you're going to continue the front-to-back thing. I'd increase the transparency on the outline, get a fuzzy airbrush, and start laying down layers of shadow. If you plan on doing scales on the tail, you could do the outlines, make them their own layer, Gaussian Blur them a bit and put the opacity at 35%. The background could be worked in later to fit the foreground. That's how I'd do it, anyway. Keep up the good work.

I'm not sure I'm someone who should be giving advice about digital artwork...but that's never stopped me before *grins*. I find that if I enlarge my view of the image, it's easier to stay in the lines and then I like to block in my basic colors for each area...then I like to use my lighten/darken tool to add highlights and shadows...If you're using Paintshop Pro 8, they have a great background eraser tool and it would be easy to erase your white background and add an ocean background. I really like the character in this pic...I'm thinking it's a mer-man? Lovely full hair and flowing tail-fin!

Awwww....just too cute.
Such a sweetheart.
So cool.

Erin (Shauna Che) Carter replies: "It's unfinished, and I really need to finish it because people seem to really like Signal."