(As with my MerMay drawing last year, there are no nipples here, Maddy's boobs are covered in scales, just so you know)

"I'll try and do something simple for this year's MerMay", I had said to myself, "Maybe just a polished sketch with some simple colors, not even bother with shading!"

Clearly I did not stick to that plan. :P

So here we are, my MerMay pic for 2021! Featuring Maddy as a flirty mermaid (slightly simplified design based on her 2020 MerMay design that I made), and Match as a pirate-- I mean totally law-abiding sailor who's just trying to do his job. :XD:

This time I experimented with an Impressionism-inspired brushset for some of the background lines, plus putting actual shading on the linework as well as the actual color blocks! Despite me making a few pics so far where the characters' lines were in a color other than black, I didn't shade them since I thought it would look awkward and/or it would be too hard to do. But it turns out it looks fine (even though in this pic you probably have to zoom in to really see it, ha ha), and it was easy! Just using a clipping mask on the line layer.

It's one of those things that's like, in hindsight, I really should have tried this sooner. Oh well, at least now I know. :u

Anyways, this may or may not be the only pic I make in May, I'm still uh, trying to sort some things out in life after the nonsense I had to deal with in April. Making this art was a nice breather from that, but, yeah. Really hoping to at least get back to my Maddy & Match fic by the end of this month, but we'll see! ^^;

I was actually going to do a short little fan fic oneshot to accompany this pic, but kinda ran out of time/ideas for it. But hey, if someone out there is actually interested/inspired enough to actually write on this idea, feel free! Just let me know so I can give it a read too, yeah? :>