Mermaid

I skipped hard surface task as I done a lot of hard surface sculpting for my Spec 3D project. Though I played with new tools when was making the necklace for my mermaid. I liked the shadowbox, however sometimes it's very hard to cleanup the mesh. For no apparent reason dynamesh was creating thousands of holes in my mesh. Panel loops are good for concepting, but when I tried to remesh the model, it separated all the panels like if they were separate meshes from the very beginning and created a gap between them. In the end I decided just to go ordinary way and sculpt the necklace by using Dam,Trim,Clay Bild and hPolish brushes. But I will give new tools a go again sometime later.

To made actual strip with beads I created custom insert brush.

I started my mermaid design with Zsketch. From the very beginning I knew that I want to give her octopus tentacles instead of fish tail. And also I wanted to sculpt a beautiful long neck, like swan or deer neck (don't ask me why, I don't know, I just wanted to). I wanted to make her a good kind of mermaid, not evil, not like a witch from Disney's movie. Now when I look at it I can clearly see that at the time I totally decided to skip the legs and the hands day XD. I am not afraid of hands anymore, not after making male and female figures. I probably just decided that I will take a break from them. It wasn't intentional though. 

I made myself a nice moodboard to help me with a design.

I wanted to make my mermaid very feminine and gentle. I wanted to make her that way, so you can still be attracted to her character, even though there is not much from a human in her. To give her more personality I had think about the way she would dress. For reference I looked at different sorts of Asian traditional dresses, as well as at some African and Indian tribe costumes. 

I liked how some of the tribes used scarification in patterns of dots. I don't like when it is too pronounced, but when it's subtle it looks very beautiful. 

On most of my reference pictures women were decorated with all sorts of handbands and bracelets. However I didn't want to add too much.

Even though I think that this kind of decoration looks absolutely stunning, I wasn't sure if it would be legit in underwater world. I wanted her body do be her main decoration, like a white swan that is very beautiful all by it's own.

Lots of small things can disturb movement in the water, but then something big, that would be considered too heavy on earth, can be used as accessory under water as gravity is different there.

To create tentacle circles I sculpted one of them, then grabbed doc and edited it in photoshop.

It worked pretty well with intensity set 25-40 depending on the size needed.

For her face I didn't really use any reference, I just sort of tried to find it. I think she came out quite Asian looking, and i must say I like it. And she's not evil at all, at least to me she looks very friendly.

Some basic hair accessory.

This is not the end, I will pose her and render same way I rendered dragon. It may not happen by the end of the module, but it will happen in next few days. So if you are interested you can follow me on ARSTATION  I will post her there.

Edit:

Here I posed her using TPose Master. I took zsketch with which i started and edited it to make it work. I made her pose a bit more asymmetrical. I turned her head a bit, changed arms and tweaked tentacles. I will be rendering her in approximately this angle.

EDIT! - FINAL PAINTING LINK - http://www.artstation.com/artwork/mermaid-5ca975ae-e658-4b9e-9c2b-71642ee6cd51