Click for larger version; click for the list of dolls.

If you like this mermaid, click the “Mermaid Monday!” tag for more — I draw a mermaid, or a mermaid-related outfit, every Monday.

Me and my mermaids! I don’t know when I started drawing paperdolls, but I can assure you there was a mermaid tail or two among those first batches, unscanned and lost. In the doll-drawing process the question “Is she mermaidable?” is a lot more important than “Are her hands right?” (Because the odds are good her hands aren’t right, and I may as well worry about what’s fixable.)

The mermaid tail process has actually been about the same since I started. Consider Exhibit A, one of about a dozen mermaids drawn for the long-gone Paper Doll Boutique, and Exhibit B, Anna’s foray into mermaidhood. I thought I had lost it, but, unlike many things that could be classified as useful life skills, coloring mermaid tails is something I’ve retained, and the basic technique has always been the same. (The main difference between exhibit A and B and the current one is the method used for blending. At the time of the Boutique, I was blending with white and not the colorless blender, which gives them an odd pearly look… Plus the scanner was not as nice as my current one.) I should do a tutorial sometime, it’s really quite easy.