Spent some time in my sketchbook thinking about all the amazing and kind of horrifying ways sea creatures have arranged their mouths, and seeing what I can combine with mermaid ideas and to what effect.
(click on the images to see larger, crisper versions of them)
I was inspired by this sketch of mine from 2017:
I think I had seen a few amazing mermaid/angler fish designs as part of mermay that year and I had to get this weird fake face idea on paper. I still love the eyes on the mermaid’s shoulders! Can’t top that visceral feeling!
But I know a lot more about sea creature mouths nowadays, and I was recently at the aquarium refreshing my visual memory, so, here’s a few more mermaids that 100% would eat any and every hapless sailor they came across, with mouths we extremely do not want to look to closely at:
Starting with a more firmly eel-shaped reinterpretation of my first idea.
And then, well, have you looked closely at crustacean mouths? There’s so many moving parts! This is not accurate to any one crustacean in particular, just, you know, feeling the vibes:
And then, well, that chest-mouth is intriguing, but what if we made that way, way weirder:
Crustaceans are horrible but you know what’s way worse? Polychete worm mouths! First I simply put one on the face:
…but that isn’t nearly upsetting enough, so:
Well it’ll be hard to top that, but, quickly, where else can we put mouths? What about the top of the head, like an anemone? I gave her fan shrimp hands too, for maximum filter feeding:
Speaking of filter feeding, what about baskers and other filtering fish? Hard to open the expected mouth that wide but maybe we can bask using the ribcage:
What else could the ribcage do? Maybe grind things up, the way skates and rays do:
And finally, well, I did really want to sneak in one more straightforward monster, so here’s a take on a gulper eel – I gave her a lure as well, where a human heart maybe could be:
It’s always fun to take an idea and explore it so thoroughly! For these I resisted the urge to go gather reference, but if I was designing a mermaid monster for a client, this is the stage where I would take these ideas as a list, pick a few that worked best for their project, and go get a big pile of reference to deepen my explorations. While I like quite a few of these designs just as they are, there’s no way that I know EVERYTHING about how weird a sea creature’s mouth can be, and in my experience research always rewards with fun new details!
If I have time later maybe I’ll come back and pick one of these to do a deep dive design investigation of – if you could pick one to see taken further, which would it be?
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