Redlining for Raeven!

I asked for some images people wanted input on last week, and if you have something you'd like me to give you feedback on, let me know! Still taking submissions for that! Shan sent me an image too, but that'll be a bit more involved, so I'll get to it when I'm home from vacation :).

Raeven sent me this image of a mermaid, and wanted some ideas for the arms and hands, with a sort of kelp effect. (I think I ended up drawing seaweed, actually oops.)

Cool! I thought of a couple options here, and I'll do my best to explain my thinking:

For this one, I went with the idea that maybe the fingers were mostly normal, but with some webbing and the seaweed/kelp kind of coming up the back of the hand. I liked the idea that she'd still have fairly solid, individual fingers, because I imagine a mermaid has to take advantage of that whole opposable thumb thing as much as possible. I also tried to give the seaweed/kelp some direction, like it's moving with her arm, and I tried to cluster more of it together as it gets closer to her elbow to match the weight and curve of her arm.

This one, I stuck with the same general idea, but instead of webbed fingers, I went with fingers that are also covered in kelp/seaweed. Maybe she grows it there, maybe it's an adaptation like those weird bugs that look like leaves? I also drew a little diagram to explain what I did with the structure of the arms, which is that I exaggerated the straight versus curve dynamic. 

Some artists are BIG on exaggerating straight vs curve, but I don't think about it a whole lot because I usually end up doing it subtly everywhere anyway. But the idea is that to emphasize shapes, you want to pair straight/flat planes with more curved planes. Sometimes, this is also used with simple lines vs complex lines, where one plane will be fairly simple lines to contrast with the other plane, which has a bunch of curves. I did that in some of the seaweed, actually. And I tend to use that concept in hair a lot. 

Anyway, I hope this helps a little, and if anyone has any other suggestions on what you could do with hands that have kelp/are kelp, let us know in the comments! You could get pretty wild with it if you wanted to, I think.