At Water's Edge

I have been making my way through some of a slight backlog of episodes of the Creative Mom Podcast. In show 52 Amy mentioned that she wished that she had a book of reference models. At that I suddenly realized that I had exactly that!

So prompted to take down the book from my shelf, I worked with the "Illustrator's Reference Manual Nudes", which I picked up at a used book store year ago. One of the nice things is that it shows each position from many different angles so that you can pick the one that appeals to you most.

Picking one that appealed for what I was thinking of, I got to work on my June ATC. Like Jessica and Amy, I knew that I wanted to work with mermaids. I have a special thing for mermaids and nayads of all kinds.


Originally I was planning for this to be un-colored, because I liked it so much as a line drawing that I finally opted to leave it as it was. But then on a whim I took out my watercolors and went to work. I am not perfectly happy with the result (the cardstock doesn't take watercolor well as I had already found out), but I love the colors.

And this was the first time I had ever used white, which I know is verbotten by some purists. With the colored cardstock though I really wanted to get the white for the light house and a more natural skin tone (ie not tinted blue).