The Phantom Inker

This is my entry for MasterRis's "Octopus BANANZA" contest. This depicts the contest judge herself as an octopus mermaid, happily swimming in the ocean and making all the fish mermaids totally jealous ;)

The girl and octopus parts were done entirely in CorelDRAW, in two sittings. The first sitting was about 4 hours to do the linework; the second sitting was, oh, about 17 straight hours to go from lines to finished picture. That's fairly short overall compared to some works I've done. My original linework is here, if anybody wants to see it.

After the basic drawing, I did the background and bubbles in Corel Photo-Paint. Everything was done with a mouse, because tablets drive me crazy.

I spent a lot of time trying to decide on the color of her lower half, and eventually landed on a slightly more pink-tinted version of the octopus in MasterRis's avatar drawing. And I still think her legs are just a tiny bit too long, but it's too late to change that now, and it doesn't really hurt the picture any. Let's face it: She turned out cute and spunky, and the picture has good composition, so I got most of what I wanted here.

This is available as a print because I figured, hey, why not? — it might make a decent bookmark or something for somebody.

Sources:

• Pose reference came from the first picture here. (WARNING: Nudity!) Ballet poses work well for merfolk :)
• MasterRis's avatar appears here; this is the picture I based her appearance off of.
• Bubble brush tutorial was found here, although these are all my own bubbles :)
• Background tutorial was found here, although, as you can see, she's deep enough that the upper rays aren't as sharp, and you can't see the surface.

And I reiterate that it's not against contest rules to use the contest judge as a contest entry's subject ;)

Update: This won second place. A big thanks to everybody who voted for it!