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While I save up, I'm pondering what I want for my first tail. Besides what material, there's color, and fluke shape, and patterns or designs... and all my pondering has me wondering how everyone else chose the attributes of their tail. Did you want one designed after a certain movie/tv show? Do you have a lucky color? Was there a marine animal you modeled your tail after? What was important to you, and why was it important to you to include?
:)
I'm going to have a tail made that is inspired from "The Thirteenth Year." I know a lot of people here get their inspiration from looking at fish. They find a fish that they like their colors and or tail shape and work it into their tail. It's pretty neat :)
I was in Wyoming and I was with some friends and we stopped at a toy store and I saw this awesome mermaid figurine. I didn't buy it and we left. The next day, however, I find out that my friend bought it for me. She gave it to me as a going away present and I loved the design of the tail, bu not so much the colors. I took her tail design, added some things, changed the colors, took away some things and viola! My tail was born!
I draw tons, so I drew out a few tail designs that I thought I might like, then refined the best ones and decided which would be the most doable for a first try. I got my inspiration from a lot of things, The new'Pirates of the Caribean movie, for example, but also actual fish and some ideas from mythology.
I have a file full of mermaid pictures on my computer so i just shift through and find aspects from all my favorite tails and add them together or i just go by my favorite tail from my Favorite movies.
as of currently it's the mermaid tails from On Stranger Tides and the tails from H2O, Aquamarine< and Fishtale
My tail is inspired by one of the dresses that Padme Amidala wore in Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones. I am obsesssssssssed with that dress (wanted it to be my wedding dress for a long time!) So that's where my mermaid colors come from :)
If you go to my fb you can see some pictures of it.
I knew that if I were to plan out every single detail of my tail's design I would over-think it and then be upset if it didn't turn out exactly as I wanted. So except for colors and materials, it's completely free-handed. Doing it this way allows me to try out a lot of new techniques and to see what works and what doesn't. It's only my second tail so I can only get better from here. :)
Orca.
Other than that, I have no idea. For the most part, my ideas are about features tails should have, or processes to try. I haven't a clue what the proof-of-concept should LOOK like, though...seems kind of secondary :P
I thought about what kind of tail I want to create.
A rather economic fabric tail.
What kind of fluke?
Just the form of the monofin covered in fabric.
What color?
First I searched for a fabric with some kind of fishy texture or pattern.
The only one i liked was out of stock, so i thought about using two plain colors.
One color for the Tail, one color for the fin.
So i chose blue and yellow.
So i made a tail somehow looking like this fish:
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...20051130141918
I still have to finish it and post pictures.
I went to the zoo & watched the fish in the aquarium. It was funny, often the pretty flashy fish that I noticed first turned out to be less appealing than the ones that looked plain at first but swam gracefully. (Lesson in there somewhere, I'm sure...)
I'm like Matt - I went straight to Orca right away.
The funny thing is, I have yet to make the orca tail! I am waiting to lose a bit more weight, and then my Mum and I will look into neoprene options. The three tails I have now are a blue test tail with no fluke, a purple test tail with fluke, and my green sea dragon tail. The first two were made to accommodate my Rapid fin, and the green tail is made for my Competitor.
Honestly, my Mum has been picking out their colours. I am just glad she is so good on the sewing machine because I am very under her level and would have no hope in heck of making one on my own yet...but soon!
In my science class, we have a fishtank full of all sorts of little fish, but we also have a Koi fish that we recently got. Every day when the teacher is trying to talk, I'm distracted by how beautiful the tail fin on it is. I like it because its so symmetrical. That's where my first inspiration came from, the I just googled other fish that reminded me of that fluke design, such as calico goldfish, veiltails, and fantails. I must really like goldfish. :)
The sturgon is my favorite fish, but i dident think about it as tail-material and started looking on all sorts of colorfull tropical fish. I also designed several other very colorfull tails, but it just diden't seem like "the one". So i designed more. Only then i thought "whats my favorite fish? oh right, the sturgon" so i tried making one. It dident turn out so well in the beginning, but i just kept drawing, and at last i got it :)
So, try looking at a fish, or a color, or something that inspires you.. that would be my advise ^^
It doesn't have to be a basic fish, it can also be something like an eel or the blue Glaucus atlanticus (a type of sea slug) it looks very beautiful.
I'm planning on making my next tail like this sea slug.:)
Watching dolphins and belugas and orcas, my fluke design came from the curved flukes of a male orca, but my pattern design came from a great white shark, I however just used one or two colors that always catch my eyes and constrast well together.
For my next tail, i might just do a full orca tail or go with a random abstract tail, which i wanted to do in fabric.
I was inspired to model it after the parrot fish as my favorite mermaids mother was a parrot fish. So for me it was really easy :)
I got my idea from watching a bunch of mermaid movies :lol: I decided that I really liked Aquamarine's fin and I came up with my color scheme by looking at a bunch of different tails and seeing which one's stuck out at me.
For my first tail, a fabric one, I am just going with my favorite color, purple. Then for my next, hopefully a nice one, I want it based on rainbow trout/steelhead.
Dragons and sea serpents ^.^ I love their scale patterns and their spikey looks.
I go with my favorite colors and combine them with some metallic color. then i pick which one i like the most.
I'm just getting a fabric tail from magictail for my first one, but in the future when I get a more realistic looking tail, I'm thinking of modeling it after either a dolphin, koi, or betta fish.
Speaking as a betta fish keeper, betta fish are beautiful unique and their tails (spade, halfmoon, rose tail, veil tail, crown tail and double tails have some amazing tails.. i love halfmoon bettas) and their fins are amazing, they come in an array of colors as well, I say go with the betta fish.. as it seems alot of people are making koi tails lately :)
I am leaning towards the betta, because they're so beautiful and diverse, and I like the idea of the "fighting fish" aspect. (more so "fighting" in a metaphorical rather than physical sense.) I kept the option of Koi in there though because I was born in Japan so it just seems fitting.
I love koi as well, I own 3 of them, their amazing creatures their always thinking..lol
but lol the whole "fighting" as a metaphor, well if your mersona's a dark or tough, like a warrior mermaid it would work, especially if you could find a way to imitate a "flare" of the male betta, that would be cool. I'd think something like a fabric or something that connects to the arms from the tail when you raise/lift your arms it would create a "flare" of some sort.. But thats me thinking creatively.
^^ That sounds great! I am pretty sure that the tail Prince Calypso got from MermaidParties has long strands of fabric. It wouldn't be that hard to put what you are thinking of on a tail. Only problem might be trying to swim without it wrappping around your arms or neck. :P
Well I mean, I just like finding metaphors and Symbolism in everything.
I don't really have a mersona yet, except that her name is Catherine and she's much more confident, assertive, and outgoing than I. (Honestly it's to the point where I have to channel Catherine when I play my flute) I don't really see her being dark or a warrior, but that is a good idea! But liek Bellasea said, it probably would be hard to swim with without it getting tangled. Plus I want to make fins for my arm like in The Thirteenth Year.
I drew up a bunch and let the forum decide!
I'm opting for a koi-styled tail. :p I have koi tattoos, so it just came naturally. I've kept goldfish for around 15 years, so again, it just seemed natural that when I find myself dreaming of my mersona, it's very flowy and showy -- like a veiltail goldfish or butterfly koi. :)
I just kept doodling mermaid tails all the time, until I found a design that I liked. I knew I couldn't do anything fancier than a fabric tail (and honestly at the time I made mine, I didn't even know there was any other way to make one other than with neoprene) so the most important thing to me was that the fabric had a scale design somewhere on it.
So I trolled SpandexWorld for a few days - it took me a long time to find fabrics I liked - and finally came upon this beautiful pinkish purple, swirly fabric that, to me, worked perfectly. I wanted my Mersona to be sweet, innocent and carefree, and that fabric just gave that vibe for me. I chose a tapered fluke because I didn't know I could cut my monofin at the time, and I wanted something more complicated than just fabric covering it.
So I came up with this, with a lot of help:
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