Hello there, hiveians!
I hope the new year is treating you well so far!
I'm here to share an illustration for a spray paint can. The paint was called "Paint It - Mermaid", so what better excuse than painting a mermaid?
Mermaids are one of my favorite things to draw, though I'm not the biggest fan of the mythical creature myself. Something about flowing hair and swirling tails is really fun to draw. Maybe it's because I enjoy swimming and playing in water myself. Eh, I've been called a mermaid before!
And this was the design on the spray can. It was for a homework, so I was expected to put up a mockup like this, though I just made excuses to illustrate. The mockup cans are from massdream.
Progress
This time the progress was a bit different than usual. This wasn't a full painting but a line-art illustration. I was expected to finalize the design in Illustrator but it's not my first preference while drawing. So I started the sketches on Photoshop, as usual.
The first sketch was a fail but I could work around with the second one, so I chose it. I'm honestly not really good with linearts. I usually paint directly on cleaned up sketches, but this time it wasn't going to work. So I set my brush to full opacity, no flow, and set up a little bit of stabilizer and slowly worked on the lines.
Then, I filled the tail so I could use it as a mask when I draw on the scales.
On a new layer, I set up the mask and sraw the scales one by one. Initially, I wanted to make the scales perfect, but as I went on I really liked the imperfections so I just played around with them.
Once I was done with this lineart, it was time to put everything in Illustrator. An all-sharp shape is easy to convert to vectors thankfully. I just needed to erase the spaces in between.
I filled the background with Cyan since "Mermaid" was the brand's name for the color Cyan. I didn't want black lines over it, so I turned the lines to a dark blue.
To enrich the illustration, I filled the background with random patterns like waves, stars and seashells. I did this part on Illustrator. I really loved the end result!
And that's it! With the background filled, the illustration was complete, at least for me. The class needed me to put the brand's name and description on it too, so I added it but honestly, I don't care a step further the illustration, haha.
Good thing is, I passed, haha.
Do you like it? :D It was one of my favorite projects. I'll always love an excuse to draw a mermaid. They're fun. Besides the mermaid, I really enjoyed the random background pattern and her tail overlapping the explanation table.