Mermaid painting process

1) First I made a sketch of some kind of mermaid. I draw a lot of mermaids actually... but I never work them out, probably because I'm way to lazy!! =P Or it's gonna be very ugly, I guess.

2) After I've put it in Photoshop, I clean the lineart a bit and choose a grey colour to fill the mermaid parts. And as you can see I made a background, so I could see from which angle the light came in :D

3) After that, I started with the highlights and the shading by using the burn-tool and the dodge-tool.

4) And at the end I made some new layers and choose the colors I wanted to use. Every layer got his own part of the mermaid. For example her hair: I took a new layer and took the brush with some dark blue and coloured it, earase were it overwrite the lineart. When I had done that I took the layer and choose 'soft light', because it gave the right effect what I wanted.

And thats how it's done! Sorry for my bad English!!

Anywho I hope you like it and if you got any handy tips please tell me so I can work on my skills so I can make my work even nicer in the future!! :D

For the full view you can go to my DeviantArt page: http://www.victomoflove.deviantart.com/