Sayo the Water Nymph

-STEP BY STEP BELOW-

Sketch - This only took a few minutes. Here is when I start to think about color palettes and what kind of creature this would be.

I chose to go with an underwater theme. I felt it worked well with the weightlessness.

I kept the back-lighting. I love to back-light my characters. I feel that it helps make your characters pop out and look like they are in that space.

Here I'm just refining more by adding in more details. I added shine to her eyes and created a shell inspired chest piece for her dress. I created the ruffles with the idea of glowing jellyfish tentacles.

Not too much of a difference here but I changed the width of the image so it felt more balanced. Before it felt too cramped. I also made the dress frame her more and added some more shine and texture to her skin.

Here is the final product. I added in special "glowy" effects to add an even more magical feel. I also tweaked the colors so that it was more teal and less blue.

This started out as a quick 5 minute sketch, but I really liked the movement and style that I had created for it so I wanted to go further.

I wanted to create a character that embodied some of the Disney characteristics that I have been drawn to over the years. This usually means using strong features like big eyes and round faces, but I wanted to push the boundaries of that mold and give her more chiseled features like a square jaw, and cheekbones. That is something you typically see in villians of the Disney universe, but I think it worked out well.

This turned out to be one of my personal favorites so I hope you all enjoy it in some way or another.

I used Adobe Photoshop CS4 and a Cintiq 21UX for this piece.