Custom Baby Mermaid Portrait Drawing

This week I finished a beautiful soft sleeping baby mermaid drawing in graphite, using mechanical pencils, as a custom commission for a lovely Mum of her gorgeous baby daughter. I’d previously drawn a portrait of my own daughter as a mermaid, which inspired this commission.

To begin I was supplied with several photographs of the baby girl asleep.  Due to the position of the sleeping child it was necessary to combine several elements from each photograph into one drawing and I had to “imagine to life” the body shape and posture.  To help with this aspect I took extra photographs of my own daughter lying in the same position, which I re-scaled to fit a younger child in the drawing.  Once I had the general body shape and position I was able to work on the shape of the mermaid tail.

I aimed to make the swirls and the trailing length of the mermaid tail a nice counter-balance and a flowing visual contrast to the horizontal length of the sleeping baby.  Once the outline was sketched out, I traced it onto the final piece of paper, which also allowed me to tweak the layout of the mermaid to be more centered on the page.

Using the photographs as a reference I began to sketch the details of her face and work on shading the mermaid scales.  I find if I can capture the likeness in the face to begin with, then the rest of the drawing comes together more easily.

The most time consuming aspect of this drawing was the tail and the scales which were all hand shaded with edge highlights.  I added darker shading afterwards to show shadows and to bring out the roundness of the tail.  I like to use an eraser to cut back into the pencil shading and create highlights on the skin and scales.  I also cut back into the pencil shading on the tail to create the fins and tail flutes, so they appear to be translucent.

This was a challenging but beautiful custom commission and I am really happy with how soft and sweet this one turned out to be!  All in all it took about 2 and a half weeks to complete this detailed 8×10 inch portrait.

If you would like your child to be transformed into a sleeping mermaid, please send me an email:

info@annemariebroughton.com

Commission information can be found here in my Etsy Shop:

http://www.etsy.com/au/listing/464763926

My homepage is here:

http://www.annemariebroughton.com

Destiny’s Cove Pirate & Mermaid Hand Painted Bracelet

This week I finished a new painting project for a wonderful customer in California, a romantic pirate and mermaid bracelet.  This was a new challenge from a design perspective, to have two figures in one small painting, and I spent some time researching pirates and tall ships before completing the design drawing! 🙂

I tweaked the size and the location of the pirate ship in the background so I could fit it on the width of the bracelet and used graphite paper to transfer the outline of the figures and details to the bare wood before I started painting.

The inside of the bracelet was painted with gold and the sea was painted primarily in greens with highlights of blue, to match one of my previous green mermaid pendants.  I focused on painting the mermaid first and capturing the shine in her hair using shades of gold, brown and yellow mixed with white.

Then I started painting the pirate and the beautiful mermaid tail.

After painting a few more details, like the tropical corals beneath her tail and some flying seagulls in the sunset it was time to give it several coats of high gloss varnish.

This piece is now Sold and is destined for a special red carpet event next year 🙂

If you would like to see more of my artwork please visit my homepage:

http://www.annemariebroughton.com

To buy my art please visit my Etsy shop here:

http://www.etsy.com/shop/AMBroughtonArt

And you can follow me on Facebook here:

http://www.facebook.com/AnneMarieBroughtonArt

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to ask!

 

 

 

Whale Song Hand Painted Mermaid Bracelet

Last night I finished painting this beautiful princess mermaid kissing a baby whale wood bracelet.  This gorgeous mermaid has long blue hair and a flowing blue tail with gold and iridescent blue highlights.  The inside of bracelet is painted a beautiful gold colour.

The design was based on my original drawing below.

I transferred the outline to the wood bracelet and painted the whole background a gorgeous bright blue colour, then started painting the whale first.  I wanted to give the baby whale a very soft, cute expression by focusing on her beautiful eye.

Next I started working on the face and hair of the mermaid.  At first it was difficult to capture the profile of her face accurately.  Painting in miniature can be tricky sometimes!  My first effort looked like this:

I wasn’t happy with the profile of her forehead, nose and chin, or her eyelashes so after some dedicated re-painting and painting and more painting, she came out looking like this, the finished bracelet:

I built up many thin layers of paint to give her skin more dimension and a soft pink colour.  Initially I tried more blue/purple shadows on her body and face but I found it just didn’t work for me so instead I used more pink/brown/light orange shades of paint to give her a nice “glow”.

This bracelet is now SOLD.

To see more of my art please visit my homepage:

http://www.annemariebroughton.com

Prints of my mermaid drawings are available in my Etsy shop here:

http://www.etsy.com/au/shop/AMBroughtonArt