Doodle for my blog

To customise my blog a little more, I wanted to create a little avatar for my name 'CatFishsmiles' so I made a girl whose looks are vaguely based on my own with added feline and fish/mermaid like features. This just shows a bit of development. Hope you like it~

Later on I'm going to try turn this image into a banner/header for my blog when I can find out how this thing works! It goes without saying blogs are very new to me. 

For this picture, I used my very rough, sketchy style which I've grown rather attached to. I like the idea of showing guidelines because it displays a sense of progression. In my Character Design work however, I'm trying to keep it clean so that all the features are very clear especially when it comes to my concept sheet. If I don't feel like it works however, I'll return back to this sketchiness but, I'm quite keen on trying out different styles.

The colouring for this picture also follows that very untamed sketchy style because it was purely experimentation. I just slapped the colours on where I saw fit and I'm surprised at how well it works. I'm really pleased with the picture overall~ Making this picture has become somewhat of a learning experience to me and maybe this style and way of colouring might come in handy for future pieces.

Another thing that was pure experimentation in this picture is drawing lips. I can't seem to find a comfortable way of showing lips because at the moment, I feel quite trapped in this anime-like style but in order to move on from that I want to start adding more realistic features. Here I've only drawn the bottom lip but I think it works surprisingly well. On some of my previous sketches like the make-up experiments I drew full lips but there's just something about it that doesn't look right. I think I might try stick with this bottom lip idea for now. I quite like it~