Cancer Zodiac{mild nsfw warning} // Timelapse Video

Here is a full Time-lapse Video w/music for the  piece: Cancer Zodiac 

Strangely, I think this piece took longer to create then the Gemini piece even though there is only one character.  I'm not 100 percent sure why, but it might be that I was just less sure about how I wanted to represent this zodiac.  The common representation of this star sign is a crab but It just felt so awkward to try and incorporate crab legs or crab arms into her design.  

So I decided to lean into the water element but even by the end of the process, I still wasn't 100 percent sure if I wanted her to be a mermaid.  I do really like the mermaid version but also since I wasn't completely sure, I ended up painting legs on her, as you will see partway through the process!

On another note though, I absolutely love how her face turned out and I feel like even in the initial sketch the face had a really good foundation.  Sometimes a rough sketch can be really intriguing but then what I loved about it gets a little lost as I paint.  However, I don't feel like that happened with this piece.  I feel like the charm from the initial sketch still comes through in her rendered face, so I am super happy about that!!

TIP!
For the roses, you may notice in the process that the nearly final roses come out of no where.  I have a bit of a trick that I used that I'm going to let you in on!  It's no secret that painting flowers can be kind of a pain in the butt.  

So, what I did was grab some stock photos of roses and open them up in Photoshop.  In photoshop I ran them through the cutout filter: Filter>Filter Gallery>Cutout.  That simplified the photos and colors down to almost a cell shaded state.  Then I brought those into clip studio paint and painted on top of them.  It gave me at least a base to start out with for the flowers, which was really nice considering I had already been working on this piece for quite a while and wanted to finish it up!

I hope you like how she turned out!  I'm curious if you guys prefer the mermaid or human version of her.  I'll be including both versions in the print vote, so I guess that might tell me, but I love to see your comments letting me know what you like.  

Music by Alexander Nakarada (serpentsoundstudios.com) Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/