Sade Sayari

It's been a long time since I've drawn this OC of mine, and I felt compelled to try again today. For the record, the girl's supposed to have 22 Charisma, which is insane. Most siren-like creatures have about 20. Geekiness aside, she's supposed to just be pretty much the prettiest girl I can imagine, which is why I never really truly capture her just right :)

But anyway, here was my sketch of the day:

I started with flat coloring her, and figured I could clean up the sketch as I went along:

Then my computer crashed, and I was upset. I walked my dog to chill out, and whined about it to my best friend haha. Ah, the art process LOL.

Second attempt at painting it... I initially wanted to change the chromatics completely, but I decided I liked this molten lava look, so I finished it up as is:

And here she is, with her little familiar, Topi the Leopard Gecko :)

Mermaids of Nemaris Island

This was a commission for author J.D. Delzer, of the mermaids in his book, The Buccaneer of Nemaris. Please do check his website for more information on the book and characters.

So, I LOVE drawing mermaids. I was so excited about this commission!
Here's the sketch that started it:

This image basically just established the stony crag between islands where the mermaids tend to relax, and their basic shapes.

Added the foliage, as this area is supposed to be very luxurious. After a chat with my commissioner I realized that this looked more like a lagoon than a crag, and some changes were done to fix that:

At this point the sketch was done and I needed to fineline my characters (when painting semirealistically, I don't really lineart, but go over the lines softly so I can delimit my color regions)

Then, I placed down the flat colors for the image:

Sorry if this image looks way too bright, I tend to work from light to dark...
So then I added texture, color and shading to the surrounding rocks and the luxurious foliage:

And then had fun splashing waves into the water teehee!

The final step was shading in the characters, adding effects to each of them as I went along:

If you'd like to see a somewhat larger version of the finished image, check out DeviantArt.

DaMuro Progress Animations

The main reason why I sometimes use DeviantaArt's strange little online drawing tool are the lovely animations of your work which you can see :D

Click the Watch Redraw Button on the upper right. This was my first portrait with DaMuro!

Click the Watch Redraw Button on the upper right of this linked page!

Ariel and King Triton!

One more Disney fanart today, and also one of Ariel, this time as a little girl, in her daddy's arms ^^

So to get inspired for this image I looked for stock photos of fathers with their daughters, and fell in love with this particular image:

So I sketched it out, using references from screenshots of Ariel's Beginning:

I then inked the drawing in SAI:

Laid down the flat colors:

And started shading it! Shading's one of my favorite parts!

Then, I worked on the background:

And finally I colored the lines so it'd look softer, and added a few lighting effects :)

Ariel and Stormy - WIPs and Final Image

Hello! Today I decided to look down memory lane a bit and choose a fanart I did as a tribute to my childhood hero, Ariel. I watched The Little Mermaid TV series quite late, but I thought it was awesome, and Stormy was my favorite episode!

I knew I wanted to draw a picture of Ariel riding stormy, as I was very inspired by a Princess Magazine picture of her on a large sea-horse:

I liked her general pose, but wanted to draw my beloved Stormy instead, so I used some screencap references from mylittlemermaid.com to draw him accurately. Here's my sketch:

Then I linearted the picture:

Flat colors:

Painted in the background (I love drawing underwater scenes!):

And finally shaded in the characters, and added some highlights:

Self Portrait Study

One more study, this time of myself, a photo I took myself. It was cropped horribly so I edited it a bit in photoshop sloppily before starting:

So I began with a rough sketch. Did some measurements, but certain elements were still placed rather poorly:

Then I did the usual thin lineart I use for realism pictures... the lines are soft and I paint over them, but even if I don't, they're not distracting in the final image:

Flat colors kind of to just isolate the painting areas...

Some building of the forms with color. Realized the eyes were unaligned and too far appart, doh.

Attemped to fix it:

The shadows were a bit harsh so I softened many of the edges, and added some semblance of a background.

Final edits, a bit of texturing, and reduced the eyes, which seemed to me to be too large. Final picture:

WIPS of a 6 hour painting study

This is the reference photograph I wanted to paint, which was uploaded as stock on deviantart here.

To begin with, I sketched out the drawing: 

  Then I blocked in the background colors

Next I isolated the area of the face, and added some foreground foliage:

Then I started adding color to the hair and some of her face:

Focused on the eyes a bit:

And the lips:

Some work on her shirt:

And some finishing touches, including a slight contrast adjustment, and here's the final image :)