The final piece I did during the Mermay 2019 challenge. I’m far more pleased with the original pencil sketch, as her features didn’t come out quite right in the painting. I should’ve used larger paper.

This mermaid artwork was inspired by the Greek myth about the Sirens, creatures with beautiful voices that lured sailors into their deaths. In the original myths their bodies were a mix of human and bird features, but I decided to keep with the fish anatomy here.

You can watch the video time lapse of the painting process on my blog: Coping when art turns out bad + Mermaid watercolor painting process

Since I was pretty dissatisfied with the result, I went back to this artwork 2 years later and fixed it with water-soluble pastels (my top secret trick for fixing bad watercolor paintings). The image you see here is the updated version. You can se the previous version in the blog post.