 Yeah, I'm wearing a sushi top in honour of my day. Hey guys, welcome back to the average. So I had this amazing idea to draw 31 mermaids in a day and I regret everything. You know it's mermaid, basically the idea of mermaid is to draw a mermaid every day for 31 days and at the end of the month you have 31 drawings of mermaids. I love mermaids so I thought yes, yes, you know what? I can do this, I can make this challenge where I'll draw 31 mermaids in a day. It's going to be totally fine and also can I add that I didn't do it in a day, I did it in an afternoon because I had all my other work to do in the morning so then I started in the afternoon and all I felt was pain. Feel pain. Anyway, let's roll the footage. Okay guys, buckle up your seat belts because I was about to say we're in for a wild ride but that's not true at all, we're just in for a long sort of car journey over the mountains and far away. I'm sorry, what, what am I saying? Okay, this video is going to be fairly long because I put many hours into drawing these millions of mermaids. They know there's not millions, okay, it's an exaggeration, I can exaggerate, it's fine. There's 31 mermaids and then I think I drew two extra just to kind of round off the image. So what I started out doing was thumb nailing out some poses for mermaids that I was going to draw. I looked online at like lots of poses and things and just drew them out. I really enjoyed that. That was a really fun part of the process. Then I tested some paper and because I wanted to use this like cream paper but it was really weird, it acted really weird with the water so instead I used this watercolor paper. I wanted to use like free sheets so I would have a clear definition of each area for each mermaid so I marked them all out and measured out how many squares per each mermaid and I was going to use three different sheets and draw it out like that. Then I realized, no, I don't want that. I want all these mermaids bunched up together because that's why I'm doing this. I want like a page of just a gazillion, yes, the numbers going up. A gazillion mermaids just like bam, bam, bam in your face. I just decided to space them out all individually around this one sheet of paper and I do think actually gridding out the area was useful because it made me see how much space each one was taking up. So yeah, I started out by just sketching out all these mermaids with my mechanical pencil that I'm actually really in love with. I used to have these cheap plasticky ones and then I just found this pencil laying about the house. I was like, yeah, I'm going to use this one and it is beautiful and never went apart ways with it because I really like it. It's super sturdy. Yeah, that's enough of a love story to my mechanical pencil, I think. We'll just move on. So what I was doing here was just copying each mermaid from the booklet. I numbered them all out and then I was trying to figure out if I had drawn them already. So I was ticking them off as I went. I know it sounds stupid but it was a pretty confusing process. I was like, this is fine. I'm going to just draw lots of mermaids all around each other and they all fit and it will be fine. But I realized that a lot of some of the spacings I had a little tiny bit of issues with but at the end what I did was just scanned it and jigged it around in Photoshop so some of the spacing was fixed that way. Whilst I was doing this, I was listening to Jake Parker and Co's new podcast called Free Point Perspective and it's just basically free perspectives of different artists talking about freelance illustration and it's a really good podcast and I was just zoning out, listening to this, agreeing with everything and hoping that I'm doing the right thing along with what they're saying because they all have been lecturers and stuff and they're obviously all very successful in their fields so it's good to listen and take advice like that. I think you always have to be open to advice. You don't necessarily have to take it I think it's good to realize when some advice is really good and some advice is really bad and for instance in this podcast I think all the advice is really good and there's different opinions within it as well so you really get like a round picture of everything which is really handy so I recommend go listening to them I will link that down below if you're interested in just listening to that and doodling along whatever or you know you can just stay here and watch me draw these mermaids until my hands bleed and you can chat. I wanted to do a longer video because obviously like I said this took time and then I just wanted to chat to you guys because I feel like that's what I like watching I like it when people talk and then I can just draw along and listen to what they are thinking and feeling and stuff so the other day I looked on Goodreads and I realized that my book had two stars from somebody I don't know why but it just really got to me and obviously everyone's entitled to their opinion and I will take critique but this person just kind of left two stars and didn't say anything and I was just I wish I could just speak to them and that is a big no-no in the writing community as I don't ever question but I wasn't wanting to question it like why have you done this? I'm really mad at you your wire books are amazing I like to question it because I would like to know why if that makes sense because I think if somebody has a bad opinion of your work there's a reason for that and I want to know the reason so I can improve upon it but also it could just be that people just are mean and they're just doing a drive-by kind of hate your stuff which happens as well but obviously I don't think that's the case I think maybe just somebody didn't like it the point of me saying this is that I put basically my heart and soul into that book and then I always get really anxious if somebody says they're reading it or nervous like I don't want you to read it when I should be proud of it even if it isn't perfect, I should be proud of that but I wrote a book not everyone does that right so it just got me really down which is really really annoying because I know whenever somebody critiques my art or anything else that I do I kind of take it and I'm like okay yeah sure I'll improve but this was, I don't know I feel like because writing is such a personal thing I don't know if it's more personal than drawing because maybe it's just I'm more used to being critiqued on my drawing yeah that's basically what happened to me and I'm trying to learn to push on past it and not let it stop me because I should be proud of what I've done and keep going and still I'm still enjoying writing the other two books so whatever if that one person didn't like it it doesn't really change anything does it? it doesn't mean that I'm going to fail it doesn't mean that I'm going to become an amazing author it's just one person's opinion and we let people's opinions really get to us sometimes but we should just say no, bye I'm going to do what I like and I'm going to do it as much as I like and just because you didn't like it doesn't mean anything you know, don't let other people affect you so much I guess is what I'm trying to take away from this but also let them affect you because critique is good there we go opinions by step I'm aware that that was a really contradictory lesson but hopefully you kind of get what I'm trying to say critique is good but people who are just trashing on things to just trash on them is bad you've got to know the difference and also sometimes people who are just hateful even if they're hateful sometimes they have good critiques to give and anyway, yep but don't let this put you off I'm not taking anything I've done because honestly I feel like that's a really meaningful interaction to me because it helps me grow and it means that you just want to be honest with me and I really like that and I appreciate people taking the time and effort to be like hey, you could fix this and if you work on that then because you just evolved to become a better artist, writer, whatever is that you're doing I had some beat readers for my book and one of them was really, really kind a detailed analysis and breakdown of stuff within the book and a couple of sentences that she didn't like and a couple of sentences she did and the character development and I really thought that was super amazing of her and she's basically the only beat reader who helped me out if you don't know what, I think it's beta beta or beta if you don't know what a beta reader is it's basically somebody I give my book an advance copy of for free and they'll kind of critique it and tell me what's happening but I gave it out to probably about 10 people and she was the only one who kind of came back and a few other people were just like, yeah, I love it and then nothing, so it's like okay, if anybody wants to check out my book it's down below in the description and it's on Amazon, it's just a Kindle book it's like 90% or something I'm not sure but it's about a girl who runs away from home she just wants to get away from a personal tragedy that happened to her and she goes to join a school of battle mages because she's like, oh flip, yeah, I want to be cool like these guys but she doesn't have the powers that they have so she kind of has to hide that and get away with it and yeah the story unravels from there so oh, there's also like these soul twins in it you have to discover your soul twin activate your powers and stuff she discovers her soul twin so that flips everything upside down of her beliefs that she didn't have powers yeah, yeah, yeah, it gets better it gets better from there, I hope, anyway yeah, back to Mermaid, sorry for that massive tangent now I'm just inking them out, I took ages drawing them and then inking them and took probably even longer I was trying to be really careful and I was really aware that if I made one mistake, 10 Mermaids later, that would be really obvious and I would have messed up this whole piece, I was really a little bit scared of this one for the first time in a while but then I got used to it and I had fun with it even though I said it was really exhausting because it was I think by the time I got near the end of finishing the painting process I was really tired and I wanted to say like no I'm done with it, like I'll finish it tomorrow but I knew in my head that I wanted that Mermaid Mermaid Day title, I was like I need that title for YouTube, that'll be fun like everyone will like that, that's a cool title right, I want to do it in a day that's my challenge, so I forced myself to finish this but it worked out because I really liked the end results even though it was hard work I mean it wasn't so much hard as it was just a long project where I had to chip away slowly at this rock and make a statue, I don't know what that analogy was about yeah it was just long and tiring and I think I probably spent maybe 3-5 minutes on each mermaid times that by 33 mermaids I did all together then you can come up with a time I'm not gonna do the mask cause I'm terrible at masking, I'll be bothered ok it was really fun to colour these I really enjoyed it, I just did simple colours at first I was trying to do some gradients and shading and then Chris my boyfriend who's also an artist was like no I don't think you should shade them, I think they look nice they're just you know these kind of raw colours and I agreed with him I think but then I had started shading some already so I didn't want it to look weird that some were shaded and then well like 10% of them were shaded and then the rest weren't so I decided to do a little bit of shading here there and gradients where I could and stuff so it took a long time I tried to make each mermaid quite individual as well I realised that drawing 32 mermaids with the same face same skin type same body was gonna be pretty boring and nobody wants that everyone wants diversity right so I tried to make different ones it was quite difficult because I think it got into the rhythm of drawing them and then you get that same face syndrome happening and I was like no I don't want that to happen I was doing a lot of details and trying to differentiate them in some way and not have mermaids with the same sort of colour tails picking the colours actually got really difficult half way through because I was like I've used this colour scheme already I can't use it again and purple hair, purple tails purple everything and I was like no I need to stop using purple even though it's my favourite and the green because in my head mermaids have green tails I think it's just little mermaid totally brainwashing me but yeah in my head they do so I was trying to stem away from that that grey one with the blonde hair I remember we used to go to this restaurant when I was little and it used to have this mermaid painting because it was like a fish restaurant we used to go to when it was on the beach and then it was a painting of the beach that we were on but there was a mermaid there when I was a kid used to be like it's real somebody saw a mermaid and then they painted them so that one sort of based off that one because I vividly remember that painting in my head anybody used to play mermaids when they were little they used to love it I used to love swimming FYI I nearly joined like a national swim team and stuff like that it was something that I was really going to follow when I was a teenager and then I just gave it up because I'm lazy and also I didn't like it so much when I was a teenager it got just too competitive it wasn't it about the swimming anymore it was about just exhausting yourself and being better than everyone and trying to do as many lengths as possible in one day and it just it kind of gets boring, tiring after a while I feel like that's kind of who I am though I get really tired of stuff and then I want to start something completely different and then a few months later I want to go back to the thing that I did before and it's just always a circle of me I want to do YouTube, I want to do writing I want to do comics but it's all things that I want to do if that makes sense to anybody let me know if anybody else is like that painting these took a long while but I really enjoyed it it was really therapeutic I really wish that I had left maybe the skin of some of them the white of the paper because I think that looks really cool and I also wish that I had scanned these mermaids in before I coloured them in so then I could have done them digitally as well just to see how that would have been or maybe I could have put it up for you guys to colour in if you wanted to I think this worked out for now but I think I've got the hook of drawing lots of things drawing lots of things at an extent I think I've got the hook of drawing lots of similar things on a page I've seen that Dina and Casey have been doing like their ants and Dina's been doing her little homes with loads of detail in them so both of those things have lots of detail that can take a lot of time don't think that these were as much effort as those other pieces that they have done but I can kind of see being hooked into doing something with a lot of detail it's just fun and therapeutic and you just see the work ahead of you and you just sit down and you get on with it and it feels nice and good I don't know, you guys have anything you're working on that you know is going to take a long time but it's not daunting it's just more like enjoyable the paint by numbers thing you used to do as a kid or those scratch off things where you would just sit and do something with your hands we're coming to the end of the painting nearly and I hope that I've spoken enough about the actual piece I wanted to do lots of different diversity mermaids as I said different shapes, different expressions originally I had this idea of basing them off kind of the Met Gala outfits this year but then I thought I would just have a lot of Catholic mermaids so maybe I'll do my Met Sona though in the future because I love looking at Met photos I think it's a time where rich people can explore doing these crazy outfits and I think if you don't go all out at the Met then you're crazy and I think there's a great opportunity for a lot of wealth to go into creativity and be put on display because I think for instance the designs of the outfits are phenomenal most of the time and it's really intriguing to see people what they do with the theme and stuff if you don't know what the Met Gala is basically it's just this big fashion event where celebrities can wear grandiose couture and it's just awesome to see these amazing outfits that are just completely over the top they're really great to look at and pull inspiration for drawing and I want to do my Met Sona for sure because it's really fun to put yourself in a designer's shoes because I'm an illustrator I've never designed fashion or I like looking at fashion but I don't think I'm very good with fashion putting myself into that design position would be quite fun even if it's just for one day and designing a completely insane outfit that probably costs more than I'll ever earn in my lifetime would be really fun so the painting took ages the drawing took ages and the penciling took ages the challenges of this project were to make sure I had a final piece with 31 mere mains that I actually like making them diverse, making them bright and colourful making them different in the sense of shape and character design and basically sitting down to do it from start to finish was also very tiring and challenging and the good thing about this project is that it forced me to draw out a lot of character designs that I wouldn't have usually done just for whatever reason it's really helped me practice faces poses, drawing mermaids of course and colouring and using the materials that I've used it's a great practice piece I think that was a really advantageous project and I highly suggest you guys having a go at it because even though it's painful maybe you can do it so yeah, that's the finished product and I hope you guys enjoyed it let me know at the end I'll show each mermaid individually let me know which one is your favourite and that'll be cool, I've numbered them all so, simple so that's it, that's the final project please let me know what you think which one was your favourite and if there's a lot of the same favourites then I might redraw one again in a larger scale just to you know, give myself more pain and horrible horrible suffering sorry please like and subscribe for more content and I will see you next time, bye