Ebi Ramen

Where do shrimp mermaids come from?

The story goes that one night, a Chinese cargo ship threw their fermented drink overboard during a storm. Poseidon happened to be passing by (he was lost) and got totally wasted on the discarded rice wine. In his drunken vigor, he proceeded to fertilize all the sea eggs he could find. And that is how the shrimp-form maidens came to be. They are mostly unheard of, though, because many of them were eaten by a tuna before they could be sighted by man. A single tuna.

Ebby Lamian is the shrimp-maid before you today! She is relaxing in a hot bowl of ramen after a long day of playwriting and picking at a dead crab. She enjoys the temperature and the fragrance, as well as the soft bedding of noodles. Her actions don’t ruin the soup because she practices the etiquette of washing oneself outside of the tub before entering it for soaking. It’s an inconvenience for others, though (but she loves the attention).

Originally this was going to be a picture of a normal mermaid in a bowl of ramen, but I thought that might be kind of weird. Is a big piece of fish a normal thing to find in ramen? Maybe. But I decided to go with shrimp since the idea of a small shrimp-type mermaid seemed interesting. Two things I wasn’t entirely happy with:

1) her tail bends the wrong way
But I liked this pose and felt it looked more natural for her as a whole, even if not as a shrimp.

2) she has no swimmerets
The main problem here was how they’d look protruding from her abdomen. I’d draw these little legs, and it’d either look nasty and bug-like, or it’d be strangely suggestive coming out from the space that would have been between her lady legs. After the third attempt I decided not to push for it. I’ll just say she swims with her arms.

My favorite thing to draw here was probably the ramen. Drawing food is fun! In particular, making things shiny is my favorite part, right alongside imagining eating the food.

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