Swamp Mermaid

Here is a thing for color contest (It ends April 30th if you wanna join! Twas so much fun!) each artist is assigned their own color palette to work with, you can see mine as well as close ups on this Tumblr Post

I stared at the palette for a few days not knowing what the heck to do with it and this was the best concept I came up with (I didn't like that puke color in the middle, but in context between the browns and blues it looks quite lovely!). When we lived in Mississippi we appropriately had a swamp as our back yard. It was really interesting and beautiful to look at every day and that's what I was thinking of when I drew this.

I went out of my comfort zone a little here. I decided to only work with mixtures of the 5 colors from the color palette. It was hard for me because I really like to use a big value range basically spanning from white to black, and I still think the image would benefit from having darker shadows, but I must stick to the boundaries I set myself! Pink has historically been my least favorite color and I tend to avoid it if I can. I also don't like unnaturally colored make up, but it just fit so well here because it makes her face pop and keeps it a focal point, so I feel happy with myself for using the color palette to my advantage (plus, if fancy make up's gonna work on anybody, it'd be a mermaid!).