In creating The Mermaid I wanted to push the limits of texture manipulation within the programme. As an artwork I wanted to challenge the viewer's perception of beauty. This artwork depicts a mermaid, but not in the typical "pretty" way often celebrated in traditional representations. Instead, I wanted to present a creature with a more complex narrative.

The face of the mermaid was intentionally designed to appear wet and cold. I used porcelain as my base for this and layered it with images of fish nets, marine animals and water scenes to get the effect I wanted.

In creating a raw version of a mermaid I felt some elemets we associate with a human female needed to be kept - hair for example - yet I imagined this as tentacles rather than long floaty hair. The tentacles pushed forward helped create a barnacle like affect across the skin making the image more gnarly and dark.

I reimagined the mouth from human to fish like blending in images of forward and downward facing mouths rather than the feminine lip shape of humans.

Cool, muted colours were chosen to enhance the sense of the viewer being witness to something somewhat familiar albeit in an alien and cold environment.