The Woman From The Sea

The "Mulher Marinha" or "Marinhas" are mythological beings from portuguese folklore. They are similar to mermaids as they live in the sea and have a tail, but sometimes they also have goat feet and small fins along the tail.

Also they have big ears, sometimes so big that they reach the shoulders or back. They have been depicted sometimes as being mute, at least until some traumatic event occurs.

During the middle ages there are accounts of them, like in the "Livro de Linhagens do Conde D. Pedro" where they were sometimes caught unawares by the lord of the land, sleeping on rocks, or combing their hair on the beach, and being attractive and beautiful they would be taken either willingly or by force (usually by force) to be the consort of the feudal lord, granting a supernatural quality to the lineage of the noble family.

I wanted to check Lendarium, which has a bunch of Portuguese folktales and legends but the website is offline at the moment. I don't know why but it's always so hard to get any information about Portuguese lore, papers are hard to find unless you know the name of the researchers... and stories are also not very easy to come by unless you go digging in medieval manuscripts... anyway...

On the subject of big ears there's also the tribe described by Pliny:

Pliny the Elder, Natural History 4. 94 (trans. Rackham) (Roman encyclopedia C1st A.D.) :
"Crossing the Ripaean Mountains [probably the Carpathians in central Europe] must coast to the left along the shore of the northern ocean until we reach Gadis. In this direction a number of islands are reported to exist [perhaps in the Baltic Sea] . . . [and] the Hippopodes on which people are born with horses' feet, which gives them their Greek name; there are others called the Panotiorum (All-Ears Islands) in which the natives have very large ears covering the whole of their bodies, which are otherwise left naked."
Source

I always thought of the two legends as being related in some way, because of the big ears and the water motif of the Panotti living in islands but there is no research I'm aware of that links the two.

So there you have it, the reason my mermaid has big ears!

This is my entry to the contest by @melooo182. It was all created in Gimp.

The process was very different to what I'm used to because this time I started with just some basic forms, instead of starting with the mouth as I always do: