The Voice

Or.

"The small harbor town in the west that, rumor says, has developed its own pocket Bermuda triangle."

Or.

"That time Nicole got catfished."

The legend of this place had traveled its way into Nicole and her friends' ears. A small and dying town on the shore with a particular zone where it was forbidden to sail due to how dangerous it was.

A not insignificant number of boats went missing in the 30s. That number of boats wasn't enough to catch the attention of non-fishermen and sailors. It was the late 30s and a lot of important things were happening. And many of these stories were discounted as drunken hearsay.

Today all the sailors of the town know to avoid the zone but from time to time some tourist or drunk teenager go there looking for adventure and to test their luck and an important percentage of the time this one ends up being bad.

Recently a superstitious small-time public officer of that town hired the service of the Whisperers ™ through non official channels so they could check out the place, see what's going on.

Nicole was pretty excited about this mystery. Not so much for the mystery itself but because she had never seen the sea before. She even got a cute tiny sailor suit for Penelope the doll who hated it at first, but in the end no one really forced her to use it, she pretended they did.

So their adventure began, and it all was normal, even boring until suddenly the weather began to worsen, and Nicole could hear through the sound of the waves something the rest of the gang couldn't. Music.

…

So last Sunday I realized that May is about to begin and for artists that means one thing. Mermaids. So I came up with this as my #Marmay piece for this year and I got very excited about it.

After spending most of last year "In the zone" I started this year with something of an artist block, the type where it's not about not having ideas for art but having them but not finding the motivation.

I've been managing it of course, doing commissions has helped a lot but when I came up with the idea for this one I got really excited, I really wanted to see it. Since my Christmas piece last year I hadn't felt like doing a big piece like this one. For this I even made up a new technique for drawing the foam and later I scrapped the foam I had done this way because I came up with an even better way. I made up around 5 new brushes to make this piece. It's not really the most original thing in the world but I basically had an idea and I really wanted to see how it would look.

Another technical aspect I have to talk about is the boat. I started sketching a boat from memory, but I didn’t really like how it turned, too cartoony, so I bought a model to use as reference. The model in question was done by 3d artist “albertobutarin” With some modifications on my part like the cabin.

A detail that I find kind of fun in this one is that Nicole is the only one to be affected by the singing of the mermaid. Nicole is canonically bisexual and when I came up with this picture I thought it would be fun for this to be the way she figured that one out. Not to be overly discussing my OCs' sexualities but she is also a bit demi so it makes sense for her to not know that about herself before this. Don't go and ship her with the mermaid though. In the words of Hall and Oates "She's a maneater". But who knows lol.

Also, she's not the only mermaid around, just the one in turn at the moment. And also mermaids ain’t the only thing lurking down below. I may revisit this idea later.

There’s also the Doll wearing new clothes for this adventure. Stop reading this paragraph if you dont’ wanna get spoiled for a possible upcoming piece I have in mind. It’s a bit out of tone with this character but I like the idea that eventually Nicole took Veronica and the doll shopping to one of those specialized doll stores and got her some different outfits. Both the Doll and Veronica hated it. But Veronica hated it more. I don’t know, It sounds fun.

As I mentioned before I made this as my #Mermay piece but I may as well keep it unpublished until October. I want to make some more pieces with this character and supernatural themes and drop them in October like last year and if I want to  that I could very well be starting now. I still haven't decided but either way here's an anticipated view to it besides it being the unglazed version and also here's the full res version. Also you can see here the very first sketch I did while conceptualizing this piece. You may notice that the first Idea for the mermaid was a seagull, but While I was working on it, for some reason it didn't really felt right and went for a brown cat, wich is a kind of throw back to a very old and obscure oc of mine. But that's a story for another day.