Dive!

I’ve been a little obsessed with mermaids lately, playing around with three different story ideas (two picture books and a junior fiction series). This is an early character design of one of my mermaid characters, Princess Pearl, hand drawn and then digitally painted in Photoshop with pastel-type brushes. This is one of the first illustrations I’ve done where I haven’t used outlines to define edges. Not using outlines was a bit of a brain twist for me, but you end up with a more 3-dimensional effect. Hopefully I’ll get better with practice!

Favourite aspects of this illustration are the colours – the blue, pink and yellow seems to work really nicely – the ‘stretched’ bubbles that add an element of movement, and the light blue highlighting on Pearl’s tail, hair and coral crown. I remember reading something in a book by artist Tim Hildebrandt about highlights and shadows under different conditions. Under warm light (such as the sun, a fire, candlelight etc), highlights are warm – think yellow and orange, while shadows are cool – think blue, purple and green. When the source of light is cool – such as moonlight, or light dispersed through water – the opposite applies; highlights are cool colours, and shadows are warm colours. Thanks Tim!