Mermie Canvas Coming to Life

The Mermie canvas is still in progress and getting it to the finish line is taking me longer than I’d hoped. What do you do when you make a colossal mistake in your painting? You get creative and channel your patience. 🙂 Mostly, you channel your patience. I’ll have more details on my flubber tomorrow. Including pics of said flub and how I’m fixing it.

I don’t own an easel large enough to work on this canvas upright, so I’ve been working mostly on the floor using my feet, legs and other body parts as my easel. It has been fun getting “into” a painting this way. I find that I’m getting lost in there a bit and that can be good.

Here are some pics of the next level of progress building the skintones and background. The goal here was to get down the first layers of undertone color in the skin. Later, I add depth and shadow and give the skin a more underwater feel (more on that later this week). In these shots, I took the hair to another level by adding the darks and highlights back in with oil pastel. I use NeoPastels. They are so rich and creamy and I just blend and push them into the canvas fibers with my fingers. Stay tuned for more Mermie tomorrow.