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Mermay Day 31: Ariel from The Little Mermaid (1989 and 2023)

Mermay is over, and of course I had to wrap it up with the one who started it all. I don't think I even need to introduce her.

For her design, I mixed both Halle Bailey and the Animated version. The animated version for the colors and the inspiration for the shell top, and Halle for the hair, face, and body. As much as I have Issues with the remake, Halley Bailey's performance is not one of them.

Ariel's design was quite easy for me to translate. Since the SETE merfolk don't have a concept of nudity, I decided to make her iconic sea-shell top into a necklace, and since there are no purple scallops that I know of I gave her an amethyst necklace as well. Her tail pattern came to me very late in the game, but I settled on the split and spots design to evoke legs and feet (in constant pain for a reference to the original).

I am very proud of how this one turned out. Happy Mermay, everyone! See you all again next year!

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Mermay Day 29: Perseus Jackson from Percy Jackson and the Olympians (2005)

Yeah, this is stretching the limit of mermaids, but I have a point. Years ago, my first real venture into telling comic stories was making a very involved mermaid AU for Percy, and in the end the design I came up with for him went on to inform the look of Singing Each to Each. As such, I felt like I would be missing the point of doing a month of mermaids who inspired my own comic story about them.

This drawing is basically the same as Percy appeared in my comic, but with a few mild edits to bring the design fully into the SETE style. Obviously, this design is of a more mature Percy than his canon counterpart (who is never allowed to grow past 16), but that's how I drew him then and I wanted to indulge in that design.

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Mermay Day 28: Morgana from The Little Mermaid 2: Return to the Sea (2000)

A quick rerun of my history with this movie as discussed on my post about Melody, When I was little the original movie terrified me so I made do with any other media that I could. Pat Carroll was brought back to voice Morgana, and as much as I am prone to "Oh it was a shameless attempt to remake the original," Carroll's performance was delightfully different. Comparing it to Ursula's deliberate and calculating control, Morgana is a functional disaster. We must stan.

Like Ursula, Morgana gave me a bit of a challenge because her look is so very human-drag-queen, but this time Disney gave me some spots to work with and inform the rest of her design. I just love her face, man. So expressive and with fun bold features. I also gave her a glowing trilobite necklace to contrast with Ursula's ammonite.

This is my most "inaccurate" piece solely because of Undertow (Clancy Brown the icon). Undertow is (probably?) based on a tiger shark, but is the size of a great white (and later the size of a megalodon) and living in the Arctic like a greenland shark. I didn't want to do another empty ocean, so I decided to just heavily fudge it and make Undertow an obscenely large polar tiger shark.

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Mermay Day 27: Lucette Gray Korchak from The Lost Voices series (2011)

I am always a fan of taking a new angle on an old story, and the angle Porter took on mermaids in her series is devastatingly brilliant. Trauma, kinship, community, self discovery, all get explored through mermaids. Luce is a great character to share space with, compelling and ferocious but still vulnerable. Give it a read if you have the time.

For my take on Luce, it was actually pretty easy. I couldn't find a way to do the purple iridescence of her scales properly, so I decided to just go with a stormy green, carelessly draped with kelp. The mermaids in Lost Voices are defined by their anger and how they channel it through mind-breaking songs, so I also knew what pose I needed for Luce: the classic mermaid, but her song isn't alluring or beguiling. It is fierce and terrifying.

I'm also quite proud of how I rendered the water here, but alas that I had to crop most of it.

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Mermay Day 26: Gabriella and Ollie from The Little Mermaid: The Animated Series (1992)

Again, a big fan of Ariel even though her movie terrified me, and even though I didn't have cable my Mom got my sister and me this VHS Let's Play Princess tape with stories of Ariel and Jasmine. The Ariel one featured a story about a wishing star and a deaf mermaid, Gabriella, and her octopus friend/interpreter, Ollie.

I think it is criminal that Gabriella has been largely ignored or forgotten by most Little Mermaid official media and fans. I find her endlessly compelling; mermaids are often defined by their musicality (or deprivation of it), so to have a mermaid using sign language and have a whole episode about loving yourself? I will never forget.

Gabriella went through a few redesigns as I tried to find the right pattern for her. I do lots of pointy stripes, and I wanted her to have a softer, rounder look to suit her character. Ollie was also a bit hard for me to design; the most famous octopus associated with the color blue is a deadly one, but fortunately I have a friend, @andy-the-8th who loves octopodes and told me that the Caribbean reef octopus is often blue (though my take is quite exaggerated in size).

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Mermay Day 25: Jinbei from One Piece (1997)

This one is a gift to my friend @jadethest0ne , who is a big fan of One Piece and suggested one of the fish-like denizens of that world. I have only seen two episodes of the 2023 live action series, so I have no idea what Jinbei's role in the series is.

Design wise, looking him up, I read somewhere that his look is based on a whale shark, so I leaned in on that. The pattern was fun, especially seeing some of the funkier mixes of stripes and spots on a whale shark, and I gave him some yellow accents for a pop of color.

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Mermay Day 24: The Mermaid of The Mermaid Summer by Mollie Hunter (1990)

The Mermaid Summer was one of the few books about mermaids I had easy access to because it was in the tiny library of my tiny grade school. the mermaid in it is much more like a minor god or a fairy than any of my style of mermaid, but she made an indelible mark on my young brain so I had to include her.

The book describers her with skin like a pearl, lips like coral, and hair like wet sand… but when angry she becomes pale as the belly of a dead fish. The ocean imagery that Hunter conjured around her is aspirational. My take on her is much more green than pearl, and I wanted to lean into her danger for this piece (especially as a fun counterpoint to Miranda). Her tail is actually based on the cover of the hardcover edition, which shows a sparkling green tail and an almost bristly-looking fin of the same color, so I made her fin a little extra tattered to complete the look.

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Mermay Day 21: Urchin from The Little Mermaid: The Animated Series (1992)

Another example of "i couldn't watch the main movie so this was as close as I could get," Urchin holds a special place in my heart as one of the very early mermen I can remember. The TV show was very fun for me because there were very few humans to get in the way of the ocean antics, and the villains were great too. Urchin actually gets adopted into Ariel's family later in the show, and I really wish more properties featured him and explored that new dynamic for him.

For Urchin's design, I think this is him before he gets scooped up by Ariel and Triton; living on the margins and barely getting enough to eat (which allowed me to squeeze two references into one picture). The malnourishment and a rough-and-tumble life has made his fins rather rough and tattered. He also didn't get any particularly bright flashes of color to reinforce his more "common" look.

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Mermay Day 20: Emily and Jake Windsnap from The Tail of Emily Windsnap (2003)

Emily Windsnap is one of the books that I feel like I should have read earlier, or at least finished sooner. I remember the first time I read it and encountered the concept of "pockets" in a mermaid's tail being a breaking point for me. Having read a few more books now, I think my biggest takeaway is that this series constantly hamstrings itself, exchanging a good exploration of themes or life in a non traditional family with quick magical adventures that don't actually resolve anything.

That said, I do think the books have a certain charm to them that I wanted to do justice to. Emily's tail being described as different from other mermaids due to her human heritage was inspired, but I could not include it in this setting. Instead, my main problem was giving her green accents without making her look like Barney. I think I succeeded. Jake was fun too, especially since purple is my favorite color, and I decided to give him a distinctly soft body to fit his role as an artsy type (I will never forgive the author for not letting him make more jewelry for his wife and daughter).

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Mermay Day 18: Miranda from Miranda (1948)

Miranda is a new movie for me (I only saw it last year), but it's so rarely mentioned that I had to include it anyway in my Mermay series. It's a comedy because it all ends happily, although I do think parts of it have aged somewhat poorly. Glynis Johns gives a spectacular performance as Miranda, giving her a magnetic appeal but keeping a playful, almost innocent personality.

For my redesign I knew I had to keep that appeal, which is somewhat difficult considering how polychromal my SETE merfolk are, and not everyone is down for Green Fish Babe. Although in lots of promotional material (and in the movie they mention "sea green taffeta" for a dress) MIranda's tail is green, a friend suggested I go with yellow to match Johns' shining blonde hair, and I like how it turned out.

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Mermay Day 16: Tristan Hart from The Vicious Deep (2012) by Zoraida Córdova

The Vicious Deep was my first foray into YA books with a merman as the main character, and Tristan is a blast to read. He is mischievous and he loves his Mom (always a plus in my book), but there is a hard edge to him that I find very compelling.

I drew fanart of Tristan years ago, but that was years before I had a design theme for Singing Each to Each, so it was very Disney Mermaid style. The book describes Tristan as having alien and vivid turquoise eyes, so I decided to keep that specifically, and build everything else around it. That's why his palette is so muted, so his eyes can really pop. I also gave him a spiky dorsal fin because I think he would like it.

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Mermay Day 15: Cody and his mother from The Thirteenth Year (1999)

I actually first saw this movie when I was around five years old, but only the last ten minutes and this was before I knew what TV Guide was, so for the next seven years or so this movie existed to me as my great white whale; I remembered it vividly, but I could not find it again. Imagine my joy when Disney Channel did a rerun for the summer.

The tails from The Thirteenth Year are quite lovely to me, with naturalistic colors and patterns and the fins have some interesting texture. The merfolk of SETE owe their arm fins to this movie. While the mother's tail is quite well documented, as it has appeared on YouTube and various auction sites, Cody's tail is a ghost and the only visual reference comes from the movie, probably because the right side of the tail-fin broke off (which you can see in the final shot of the movie and why I decided to incorporate it here).

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Mermay Day 13: Alina from Barbie: Mermaidia (2006)

Unlike Nori, the design for Alina/Barbie was very easy for me. The top can be easily interpreted into rosettes made of seashells, a nice loose shawl, and beautiful patterns on her tail and fins. Since I already drew Nori, I knew I needed to make Alina a stunner to drive some tension between them, but I also made her "whale-eyed," that is giving her black sclera, to give her beauty a little bit of an edge.

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Mermay Day 13: Melody from The Little Mermaid 2: Return to the Sea (2001)

Triton destroying the grotto was terrifying for me, so for many years the only Disney mermaid media I could enjoy was the animated Little Mermaid series and the sequel. Yeah, there's lots to not love about it, and it rehashes a bit too much of the original, but I like the parallel of Ariel basically turning into the parent she rebelled against.

For this piece, Melody was pretty easy to remake for SETE style, but the biggest difficulty was Tip and Dash. Penguins live in the southern hemisphere, walrus in the northern, and as much as Disney plays fast and loose with geography, I do not so instead I replaced Tip the Penguin with Tip the Geeat Auk, a recently extinct flightless marine bird of the northern hemisphere and historically also called "penguins." Talking animal sidekicks don't exist in SETE, so these two aren't her besties. She's just talking to them the way we talk to cats; they might understand, but they don't feel the need to respond.

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Mermay Day 11: Nori and Nalu from Barbie: Mermaidia (2006)

I had several of the original Barbie animated movies growing up, but Mermaidia was not one of them. By that time, my appreciation for mermaids was unfitting of an AMAB child at my age (my parents were great, school was the problem), but I did manage to watch it on TV one time.

Nalu was one of my original animated youth crushes, but in doing research for this, I realized he looked much less femme in my memories. That's why I let him keep his softly colored lips and full eyelashes. His little kelp bandolier was fun too, and since in Mermaidia, his tail was very simple, I stuck to that theme.

Nori on the other hand… the Barbie mermaids in this movie has very complicated outfits that were quite difficult for me to translate to a more naturalistic color pattern I use for mine. It took three versions for me to settle on this spotted look, as the others wound up looking to deliberately drawn. Still, she was very fun to draw; adapting her hair style was much easier, and I loved the gradient in her tail, so I kept that too.

It was also nice to have Barbie remain a free agent but help set up her enemies-to-friends Nori with the prince. I know everyone in the Barbie movies has to be a knockout, but I did try to make Nori look a little bit plain when compared to Barbie's effortless perfection (more on her later)

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Mermay Day 10: Zac Blakely from Mako: Island of Secrets/Mako Mermaids (2013)

When I tell you I was feral after seeing the first trailer, I need you to understand something: I had not seen a merman in visual media since a particular DCOM. So yeah, I was a little bit deranged. I didn't grow up watching H2O, so this was my first introduction to Australian mermaid media.

Zac, as played by Chai Hansen (credited as Chai Romruen) is an excellent merman on screen; he swims with power and grace, almost on a level with Daryl Hannah in Splash, so I knew I had to do this for Mermay. Zac's tail is a beautiful gradient of color, but that doesn't work with my style, so I did a little sharp marks and color zones. Zac's tail in the show is also very sharp and ragged looking (on the back especially) so I incorporated that where I could. Again, adapting the trident from metal to shell and bone was a challenge, but since Zac's trident is a more moderate size, it could be carved out of a single conch or two.

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Day 9 of Mermay: Aquamarine from Aquamarine (2001)

Controversial opinion, but I am not a fan of the movie. It is a very poor adaptation of one of my favorite books, so I'm not about all the really questionable decisions made to expand it into a movie. My version of Aquamarine is therefore based entirely on the book.