The Little Mer-seal

muse
-noun
1) One of several goddesses of classical mythology presiding over the arts.
2) A person who serves as a source of inspiration to an artist.

Alternate definition:
The part of an artist responsible for inspiration and creativity, referred to as it's own individual entity, due to it's habit of defying reason, logical thought, and occasionally the wishes of the artist, as if it had a mind of it's own.
Example sentence: "My muse demanded that I draw my favorite character.  After that, my muse must have gotten mad at me for something, because it gave me artist block."


So, for the past, like, two freakin' years, my muse has been all, "I am in love with Trigun!"  This past week, for reasons I will never be able to explain, my muse came to a screeching halt and said, "Vash?  Who's that?  Whatever.  I'm all about making my own characters, baby!"




I have no idea how long this will last, if it's permanent, or if I'll wake up tomorrow morning craving Trigun again.  Honestly, though, I hope it's permanent.  I've got some characters and stories floating around my head for a while now, and I'd love to work on them without Vash's goofy-haired head popping up to demand the attention of my imagination.

There wasn't really much point in saying this, just that I think muses are strange and interesting things, and mine was acting quite strange and interesting this week, and I felt like sharing.

In other news, I drew a mermaid!

I have a love-hate relationship with mermaids.  I want to like them, but I have trouble sometimes.  There's this overly logical part of my brain that doesn't like the idea of something being half mammal and half fish, and that the two halves are cut so cleanly in the middle.  This is really rather silly of me, because griffins are just as bad and they don't bother me at all.  And on the topic of marine mythology, I'm rather fond of selkies, seals that can take their skin off like a coat and they're human underneath, and there's no logical way and entire adult human being can fit comfortably inside a seal skin.  But that doesn't bother me.  But mermaids do.  I don't know why.

Some time ago, I was musing over mermaids and came up with two ideas in one sitting.  One was, rather than being cut in the middle, they should be hybrids, with either the human half showing fishy traits, or the fish half being the tail of a marine mammal.  The other was, "What if mermaids were weird looking?"  Rather than, "I think I saw a mermaid!  She was beautiful!" it would be, "Holy crap, what was that thing?!"  Since then, I've had a mental image of a weird mermaid in my head, and I finally drew it.  She actually turned out rather different than what I had pictured.  Somewhere in there, seals lodged themselves in my subconscious (maybe selkies had come to mind again), and rather than being half fish, she ended up being a seal hybrid of some kind.

So she's a sealmaid?... a merseal?... Don't ask me, I only drew her.

Heh, can you say, "crappy background?"  I didn't really want one, and didn't really care, except she looked funny floating on nothing.

Anyway, I played around with colored line work again.  This time, I used a marker, to get a bolder, more noticeable line, while still coloring with colored pencils.  I used green because, in the original idea, there was a green tinge to her skin and hair.  But then the seal idea took over.  I gave her a green top, just to get something green in there to go with the line work.

On a humorous note, I debated a while whether or not to make her topless, since mermaids traditionally are that way.  What settled it was when I realized if I ever posted a nude picture on my blog, my friends would be all, "Tee hee hee, Sarah drew a naked person!  Sarah, how could you!" and I would never hear the end of it!  Besides, I like the idea of mermaids making clothes out of kelp or something.

And, finally, a brief update on my dress.  Here's a work-in-progress pic.

 This is the front half.  I'm about halfway done with the back half.  I'm gonna say I'm not a big fan of using these fabrics (poly-satin and chiffon).  They're so slippery!  I can't wait to go back to nice normal fabric.

Peace out!