Create Mermaid Drawings Digitally!

This lesson on mermaid drawings took me a while to create because learning how to draw mermaids is one of the most challenging digital art drawings I had never done before! So if I can do it, so you can you!

Not only are you dealing with a fantasy creature that takes parts from the human and the animal world, but you are also introducing the element of water.

Water itself is a challenging subject because you have to draw how your subject is suspended in the water as well as light patterns as it moves across your subject.

There are very little secrets to this drawing, either. It's just good old fashion hard work with the most basic digital art tools and a strong artistic foundation.

Just follow along carefully and you would be surprised on how well you can create a convincing mermaid drawing on your own.

I know I was!

1. Sketching out your mermaid drawings

On a new layer, start your gesture drawing of your mermaid. As you sketch her humanoid upper body, decide how you want her torso to flow into the lower body.

Will she have leg-like bends or will her backbone flow right downwards to create a natural tail? Will she have a dolphin-like tail or a fish like tail? Are there any extra features that you can include?

Personally, I went with a dolphin-like lower body. I have also decided to add flying fish-like wings to help her move in the water.

While you are doing the sketch, think about zero gravity. Suspend her body in the water with cues like wavy hair, a curved posture, and folded clothing.

As you finish off your gesture sketch, decide on how you want separate and fill in your layers.

For instance, I filled the background layer with a gradient fill to start my water colors. Then I drew a grey solid object outlining my mermaid.

From there, I merged both the mermaid sketch and my grey solid object together to make a nice solid form that the background cannot show through.

Other stuff, like the wings and the clothing, I can add on through additional layers.

2. Detailing out your mermaid drawings

You will spend a lot of time here creating the realism from your initial gesture sketch. I recommend working on the body first.

To do that, preserve the transparency of your mermaid object and begin blocking in muscle tones. We are not worried about lighting just yet.

You will be switching between your smudge tool, your digital art brushes, and your eraser tool to get this right.

For example, block in parts of muscle mass with a chalk brush, smudge that into place, switch to a smaller brush for details, and use the eraser tool to refine the outer boundaries of your mermaid object.

Toggle the preserve transparency option on and off to help you properly define your mermaid as well as making it easier to paint things (like each individual finger or changing how the tail will look like entirely).

For clothing, think about adding it through a different layer. Of course, make it a solid object first so the background doesn't show through.

After that, change the transparency of that layer as a means to adjust the translucent nature of clothing underwater.

You can even start on the surface of the water by adding just a few lines to signify where the light source is coming from.

3. Add extras to your mermaid drawings

Sometimes, you can leave your mermaid drawing as is or you can challenge yourself and draw clothing underneath water.

There are a few tips here that you can use to draw translucent cloth.

What I recommend first is to preserve the transparency of your cloth layer and start working on the details by painting white marks on a black cloth object to signify folds in the cloth.

Smudge those into place as you carefully paint how the light will hit the cloth. Remember to curve the cloth to make it look like it is suspended in water.

Once you are done, the trick here is to change your cloth layer from 'normal' to 'screen.' What this does is effectively change all the black parts of the cloth into negative space so that the background can show through.

Don't forget to work on your background! Smudge and repaint sections of it to create natural flowing water.

As for the lighting, the trick for that one is to erase into your mermaid. To do that, start a new layer and begin painting streaks of light where the light source is. Place this layer at the very top.

User a large round brush to emphasize the large light source and smaller brushes to dab surrounding spots of light.

From there, use an eraser and erase parts of the light rays that have shined on top of her body. Repeat this step until you get rays that shine in the background as well as the foreground.

Then, lower the transparency and change the layer blend to 'soft light/overlay' to bring out the lighter colors from the darker colors.

4. Finishing your mermaid drawings

Perhaps one of the most common things that artists will forget to do is create underwater lighting effects.

It is not difficult to do, either. On a separate layer, all you need to do is create random crisscross patterns around the subject.

Do not forget to crisscross in a way that moves with the curvature of the mermaid. Any smooth surfaces will have these lighting effects so you need to choose areas carefully.

Then, just blur your layer using internal filters in your digital painting software. You can even set this layer to a different blend mode to further emphasize the lighting effects.

Depending on your software, you can change this lighting layer into a clipping mask as a means to paint within the boundaries of the mermaid object.

Otherwise, just erase parts of the lighting layer that are out of place.

At the end, you can put in additional effects like bubbles. Just select a hard round brush tip, set the option to scatter on pressure, and gently paint in where the bubbles are.

After that, you can repaint some of the lighting on the entire composition. Use a darker hue as you approach the bottom of the water to give an illusion of depth.

In the end, I hope you enjoy this lesson on mermaid drawings. It was definitely a challenge for me to create this mermaid drawing tutorial.

I look forward to what you can come up with. Remember, a bit of patience and having a good artistic foundation can go a long way!

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