affinity designer (WIP) Mermaid Girl - Advice Welcome!

[Fantail]

Finally laid down the flat shapes. Any advice on how to make those random red blobs have a more natural flow? Or generally how best to model such a shape.

Thank you! 

(Not my character. Mermaid design based off of Eleanor Forte.)

[Fantail]

Added some more details and basic shading, but problem still stands. That sploosh at the tail looks like an abomination.

[Fantail]

Some more details, whooo! And I did manage to improve the shape of that tail sploosh. Now onto shading those things...

 

[retrograde]

Have you experimented with effects/inner shadows at all? They can add a bit more dimension to your work. Also using semi transparent darker gradients with a multiply blend mode for shadows...

[firstdefence]

Nice drawing, very sweet.

A few observations.

1. Needs more scales on the lower body 
2. Hair needs more definition, more hair strands
3. The right hand looks more like a hoof than a hand
4. You need to neaten your curves because you have flat spots and they would look much nicer having a nice flow to them.

[Fantail]

9 hours ago, retrograde said:

Have you experimented with effects/inner shadows at all? They can add a bit more dimension to your work. Also using semi transparent darker gradients with a multiply blend mode for shadows...

What do you mean by inner shadows? I'm not very good with the terminology 

I kind of didn't want to use too many special blend modes because I wanted to control the number of colors are on it (except for gradients) with a strict pallette. Not so sure if it was a good idea though, just looking to experiment.

5 hours ago, firstdefence said:

Nice drawing, very sweet.

A few observations.

1. Needs more scales on the lower body 
2. Hair needs more definition, more hair strands
3. The right hand looks more like a hoof than a hand
4. You need to neaten your curves because you have flat spots and they would look much nicer having a nice flow to them.

1. I don't know how many to put on there. If I put too many, it feels weird if I don't scale out the whole tail. But if I put in too few, it doesn't have the desired effect. Any tips for that?

2. I'm working on it atm

3. Hands are hard but I'll try!

4. Can you elaborate? Do you mean like how the tail isn't perfectly arched?

 

Thank you both for the feedback!

[firstdefence]

1 hour ago, Fantail said:

1. I don't know how many to put on there. If I put too many, it feels weird if I don't scale out the whole tail. But if I put in too few, it doesn't have the desired effect. Any tips for that?

2. I'm working on it atm

3. Hands are hard but I'll try!

4. Can you elaborate? Do you mean like how the tail isn't perfectly arched?

 

1. Its a judgement call really, I thought it needs some more to give it more of an impression of scales. If you like it the way it is leave it.

2. Good to know, again there are no rules per se, just stop when you like it, A lot of pointers are really subjective, meaning what I would do isn't what anyone else might do, that's art, it's you that makes it unique. My sister paints oils and has a very distinctive style, unmistakably Milly

3. Hands can be tricky, you could get away with duplicating and then flipping the other hand, I won't tell anyone 

4. Yes, flat parts, they kind of draw the eye, whereas curves let the eye flow over the curve. If I'm drawing a curve manually, I will use an ellipse that I rotate to act as a guide while I move the nodes, a bit like a French curve/frisket once I have the curve er! "curved" I can delete the ellipse guide and carry on.

[firstdefence]

Here is a visual example of what I mean, I dropped the opacity of the ellipse so I could see in or out what I would need to move.

There are ways of creating nice curves using geometry operations also known as boolean operations, by adding and subtracting shapes from each other.

[Fantail]

Wow, thanks for the detailed explanation! That was really the one point I didn't get, I just didn't see it before but now that you pointed it out, that hard edge irks me too haha 

I've just been tracing my sketches - all flaws included -  so far but it seems vector is a whole different world of things to learn! I'll do some fixing now and update later when it's done

[firstdefence]

I love the diversity of art, so many creative people on here, very inspirational.

[Fantail]

Ok, I reworked the tail curve and her left hand. Simply mirroring the other one turned out to be the wrong perspective. And sketching an ok-looking hand in pixel mode is so much easier than getting it to look good no matter the zoom  But I think I'll try to work on the other points first before reworking the hand again to get my mind off things...

[firstdefence]

Looking much better Fantail, the hand works well and the tail is a lot more elegant.