Drawing Tutorial: Let's Draw A Mermaid

Drawing Mermaids!!!! I've never ever drawn a Mermaid before, so there's a first time for everything, I'm more used to drawing monsters and demons, but that's the reason why I want to diversify and show more drawing tutorials and how to blog posts on other stuff, because I'm still a learning artist like you, the thing about drawing is you've got to constantly challenge yourself and draw things you wouldn't draw in a million years, and so Mermaids are the order of the day!

Getting the balance right of a half fish half woman can be difficult, as there is a tendency to over weight the woman half of the Mermaid and leave the fish tail half looking ridiculous, the thing that I've realized when practicing drawing a mermaid is that you can draw the fish tail end as large as you want and the woman half still looks ok.

Right, lets get on with it shall we? - First of all, what I do in my tutorials is to draw the drawing complete and then I backtrack through each step using my lightbox to trace each step as I would have drawn it from scratch, so throughout, you will see a changed pencil line on some of the drawing, this is because I traced at each step to show again how each part of the mermaid is drawn.

First I like to draw a rough skeletal shape which is an ideal place to start and I like to draw a curved line which will be the mermaids spine and fishes tail, see the drawing below to see what I mean...

Now we want to work on that fishes tail first, so that we get that curved tail right as this will be the most dynamic part of the mermaid together with the mermaids hair which will be floating under the water, try and draw the shape around the spinal line that I've drawn below...

Now we need the drawing to come together and the arms need to be sketched in at this point, so that there is some sort of balance, it's all about testing the position of the arms, to see if they look right, it took me two times to get the arms looking good against the flow of the fish tail, take a look for yourself at how the mermaid is coming along....

Now the hair is drawn in roughly and the head is sectioned off with a cross grid to mark out the eyes and the mermaids features, aswell as some smal detail on the fin of the fish tail and my favourite part the boobs are drawn in roughly too....

Now the final stage of the pencil drawing is completed with the eyes and nose and mouth drawn in, try to keep them in proportion of the body and a criss cross pencil mark has been added to a random part of the fish tail to show fish scales and also we draw a cheeky star fish bra to cover the mermaids bazookas....take a look!

Now, you can ink the mermaid drawing to make the mermaid appear more clearer with a permanent ink that is darker, I use the finest ink pen which is usually the cheapest from the store, see the final drawing below.

Drawing mermaids are quite fun to draw, so why not have a go and draw a great mermaid....