Blue Waters by Flynn-the-cat on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

PRINTS AVAILABLE on Zazzle

RedBubble
My RedBubble Gallery
My Mermaid Paintings and Drawings

Time Four hours
Tools ArtRage 2.5 and digital tablet

Edit Went over it again to remove some of the blurriness and add a bit more detail - some I left to help enhance the impression of being underwater.
Also, added the back - fading - hand, and fishies.
Fish closeup here [link]
:thumb95630500::thumb95630887:

Also wanted to ask opinion on perspective - spiralling down or swimming towards? I'm hoping it looks like both.

General background
=AlameaLio's prize for winning joint second place in *jennyleigh's contest .

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU LEAVE ME ALONE WITH A SWIRLY TAIL AND OCEANNESS AND ARTRAGE. The hippocampi swims off and a merperson arrives.
General themes/prompts were: horses (which swam off) marine life (obvious), space and stars... the deep ocean and deep space always felt similar to me, bubbles vanish into stars, fading into the night...

About the picture
Face deliberately left without visible features because whenever I tried imagining a face, I realised that I didn't feel able to paint it in such a way as to leave the attention on the bubbles/curves - people look at the faces, they can make or break and take it out of the abstract and surreal and into the realm of character depiction, and I felt it would interfere too much with this one. I also liked the shadowy mystery the shadows gave.
Hardly any layers... I'm getting better (as they kill my computer)

The bubbles are a lot of different things - some hand drawn, some 'glitter', and the bubble streams were sort of drawn from memory from when I went diving.

Entered in ~onceuponatime08's Spindle's End Contest
I got an honourable mention!