Here is the final of my little serie about water type alien creature. I putted all the stuff together and made this final loop. I hope you like it. Thanks for your support and notes. Cheers! :D 




http://javoraj.tumblr.com/

#characterdesign #conceptart #design #illustration #drawing #whales #alien #mermaid

Here is the little timelapse from working on the Mermaid. You can see how I am trying different colors, textures and details. I am also focusing on lighting, atmosphere, water "dust" particles, and skin  translucence. Everything has to give deeply dark, underwater feeling.

I've chosen the sketch for the mermaid character. It's gonna be this type of creature. The sketch is more schematic and simple, just depicting the feel of the figure and silhouette. But it's enough for me to start detailed 3d version.

                                                             ... To be conutied ...  

In this update I am proofing the 2d/3d workflow for myself. I love experimentation, but it demands a lot of testing without guaranteed success. So I've decided to make small bust from the sketch before to explore my ideas. I am usign mostly Maya and it's sculpting tools + Photoshop. It supposed to be a sculpt, with clay look, but finally I added subtle tint to enhance the gill and special eye to add more character to the creature. Result is not bad, for design purposes process was faster than I expected.
I hope I'll do some tutorial for the technique itself later. Whole thing is rendered in Redshift.









#characterdesign #conceptart #design #illustration #drawing #whales #alien #mermaid

Here you can see how I am utilizing some stuff from exploration before and trying to capture the creature with simple gesture sketches. I am watching references of girls, mostly under water, to get idea about some nice figure pose. And in the same time I am projecting all the water body elements into their figures. Many of them won't be selected and I delete them. But they are not useless, the bad sketches can help me to distinguish the good ones.

Beluga test was interesting. During this work I decided to do something similar but with human limbs. These are very important feature of developing character. Ps is very versatile and you can deform the source in various ways to clarify your ideas. I used picture of female anatomical model from www.anatomytools.com. They have perfect models. I even own the male version. So the goal was to literally flaten the leg and make the foot bones spread to create something like a flipper. During the process, I discovered, I really like to introduce skin membrane like a part of the body. It's not typical for marine mammals, but it looks cool.