How to Draw: Mermaids 🧜🏽♀️
Added 2025-05-19 17:00:12 +0000 UTCMermay is well and truly underway and it's time for us to explore some mermaids in our gesture drawing practice.
Finding the perfect reference for drawing mermaid gestures can be tricky, because we know how notorious they are for not letting humans take their photograph! But in this video, I will show you how to take human photo reference and adapt them to create your own unique merfolk.
I love doing this because it really forces us to use our imagination, to not simply draw what we see. This is always the goal with any gesture drawing, but something about the mermaid character really makes this exercise fun to explore.
Reference Packs
Lucky for us, some of my favourite reference sites do have some mermaid themed pack.
Studio Grafit:
Underwater Floating Female Poses - 30% off with code FLOATING30
Mermaid Bundle - See the list of packs inside the bundle
My Pinterest:
Mermay Board - my collection of references.
Top Tips for drawing mermaid gestures:
In this video I cover my top 5 tips for capturing dynamic believable mermaid gestures, including:
Turning two legs into one tail
Using the hair and tail designs
Creating angles for weight
Using anatomy knowledge to design mermaid details
Bubbles!
If you create any of our own gestural mermaids, I would love to see! You can share in the Community Chat or tag me on Instagram @gilliangestures.
Happy Mermay!
