Mermaid of the Barents Sea

Hello! Here is a mermaid I have been working on for quite some time! I was a good amount finished with her but my apartment flooded and things got real crazy real fast.  A ton of stuff was completely ruined, including a bunch of books, clothes, and more heartbreakingly a lot of my art! A lot of older stuff but its all on here so its really crazy how thankful I am of the digital archive. Every pencil sketch I have ever done since highschool, and probably 60 paintings  got wet. Most dried ok but some got colors reactivated and bled on each other because theyre watercolor, not to mention some muddy and weird stains. So yeah its a mess, by now we are in a new apartment and working with insurance, but one of the pieces that got wet was this one! Just the bottom green parts but it really got rid of a lot of highlights/ shadows and made everything all one medium green so I had to go back through at the end and fix that. Anyway now that that's all aside, on with the piece!

I was super excited about mermay this year because I have lots of mermaids in the past, and I was ready to do more mermaids aside from my 3 sister mermaid series (blue, purple, green). I was actually really inspired by a tumblr post you all have probably seen, talking about the Little Mermaid and how her and her 6 sisters represent the 7 seas! But I didn't want to do disney fanart because I want to be able to own these mermaids and do whatever I want with them, like prints. And analyzing the 7 seas that the posters attributed to the sisters... I didn't agree with them. SO I picked my own 7 seas and I will be illustrating a mermaid from each of them! It took a long time to decide on the seas, too. I wasn't sure what angle I wanted to go with. I could easily go with what seas would probably have been the biggest/ most known when the fairy tail was written, Medieval seas such as Caspian, Adriatic, Mediterranean etc. Or what are literally the 7 biggest seas. Or the 7 oceans! But I decided to go with seas sprinkled all around the world more evenly, and I might go back in and do eeeeeven more mermaids of all the others I missed. There are a lot of options! So I'm really only typing all this stuff here and it will reveal how many people read this/ know about my deviantart and the true inspiration behind the series!

So this first one is the Barents Sea located in the Arctic, by the Norwegian waters and Russia. It is thought the myth of the Kraken or giant sea monster came from roughly this area so I thought that was a perfect subject! She is a warrior mermaid from the region, called on to fight this colossal beast! For brainstorming her armor I was thinking what would a mermaid use underwater? What found objects are strong and could be used, as sort of a scavenger? So decided she would find discarded shells and turn them into armor such as lobster vambraces or a turtle shell shield. Abalone shoulder plates and seaweed wrappings to give minor protection while keeping mobility. Barnacles would be beneficial, again for protection! She would probably find a stick and a Spiny Murex shell, take off some of the spines and create a spear. While I was researching I discovered someplace called Lygnstøylsvatnet, and technically its more of a lake and not the sea but I fell in love with the colors of the water! So I snuck that into the color scheme for the piece. 

And here it is! It's 11 x 17 inches and watercolor