brindis*

There is a mermaid race in my manga story, I’ve never fleshed out its design so I was thinking about it recently. I have a betta since last year and I wanted to have this race to be a pretty betta-based race, but the thing about bettas is they have short-ish bodies, and so if I go with the normal approach of turning the legs into a fish body with a tail at the end, and fins on either side of the pelvis, it looks super bizarre to me, as if the mermaid has 2 connected torsos LOL. but if I just straight up draw the lowerbody as just the tail it would look really creepy too, as if they’re amputated. In the end I decided to have these “mermaids” retain their legs, but treat them as fins, just like their arms. That way the position of their fins would match the betta’s most closely, just with their belly fin turned into 2 leg fins, and they wouldn’t look like freaks with 2 torsos!

__________________________________________

Get the art files for this drawing, like hi-res-jpg, layered psd file, steps, and full video at  ♦ http://patreon.com/shilin ♦