ArtOrder Inspiration Challenge - Process

When I heard about ArtOrder's Inspiration Challenge, I jumped aboard. This was a VERY open and fun challenge.  You basically illustrate anything that inspires you.  I ended up illustrating something that inspires a lot of my art, which is aquatic scenes and creatures.  I've always loved the water;  From pretending I was a mermaid when I was a kid to scuba diving which is now one of my main hobbies besides art making, so it's pretty fitting.

Figuring out which inspiration to focus on was tricky though!  So many things popped into my head: fairy tales (Peter Pan in particular), art nouveau, trees/nature, Artists like Arthur Rackham, Dulac, Klimpt, John Bauer, Kay Nicholson, Waterhouse, and a billion more, water, flying, fantasy creatures, flowy hair, Greek myths, and on and on... I really didn't know what to do, there were too many ideas floating around.  Here are a few idea scribbles:

 

After 2 false starts (I actually finished a whole painting but decided not to use it for the challenge), I finally decided on the underwater/mermaid theme.  I also threw in an old gnarly tree (love drawing those). I did some rough thumbnails to help decide on a composition/pose. Here are a few of them:

 

I then collected some reference and drew a sketch on some watercolor paper:

 

I inked it with a brush and some pens:

Next came the watercolor. One book that I ended up flipping through to give me some ideas for the this stage was "Dreamscapes: Creating Magical Angel, Faery & Mermaid Worlds in Watercolor" by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law. It has some great little watercolor tutorials in there.

Here's how the watercolor turned out: 

 

I took a last step of finishing it off digitally. It's the best of both worlds. I love traditional but I also love digital.  Since I'm not where I want to be yet with my watercolors, it's nice to have the option to finish it digitally. It's also faster (no drying time) and I was running short on time.  I took some inspiration from a Muddy Colors blog post that Justin Gerard did where he uses a similar process.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with it.  If it gets picked to be a part of the ArtOrder book that would be awesome!  But if not, that's ok too.  I learned a lot during the making of this painting and continuing to learn and grow as an Artist is the most important thing.