MerMay 2022 ~ Day 9 - Sealife

I'd like to sincerely apologize for forgetting to post yesterday's prompt on here. I made sure to have it taken care of on Instagram first since I was quite late on finishing it (I posted it like 2 hours before it hit 12AM), so I didn't really stop to think about posting it on here and on Ko-fi as well. I'll be fixing that now

This one was honestly a struggle to get through, and I wasn't very happy with it at first cause I was thinking of just bsing it without any mermaid. But that wouldn't fit the theme of MerMay, would it? I had to add in a mermaid somehow, so why not take inspiration from the main character of Subnautica?

If anyone seeing this knows the game Subnautica, it's basically an open-world adventure game where you traverse this unknown water world filled with alien creatures that will either benefit you in survival, try and kill you, or both. Since I don't have a lot of experience in making detailed sealife pictures yet, I thought it would still be nice to go for the sealife you'd see in Subnautica. I added in table coral, acid mushrooms, and I also included the kelp forest biome way far off in the background. And thanks to a certain friend of mine, I decided to bring in Bladderfish, Peepers, and Holefish to make the Subnautica setting more lively.

When searching up references for how I'd be able to draw my mermaid to fit the setting since mermaids don't exist in the actual Subnautica game, I actually saw a few references of people in diving suits that look like they have mermaid tails. I thought it was a pretty cool concept, so I tried my best to draw the mermaid diving suit at a certain angle that I don't normally do. The perspective of it is probably wrong, but I still like how it turned out either way when I was racing the clock.