Hello everybody, First of all I would like to thanks 3DTotal for giving me the opportunity to write a tutorial for this amazing site. It really means a lot to me because when I started learning 3D I followed a lot of these tutorials and now I have the chance to make one – the cycle is complete!

From the beginning I've never really been into fantasy creature or video game characters (I tried them, but without much success), so I decided to look for my own style. Step-by-step, and with a lot of pain, I'm finally starting to create characters that I like. One of my favorite Peter de Seve's quotes is, ''An artist's sketches are like a catalogue of shapes he likes. When I draw something, I try to find shapes I like. I think that is what people are calling style.”

Enjoying Summer Break is one Illustration from the serial Life in Pink. It is definitely one of the steps in my search for what we call style. I obviously have a lot of other new characters that I'm working on right now and they will also help me to refine my artistic skills and style. Without any further delay, let's jump into the tutorial.

My first idea for this illustration was to create a super-appealing girl, who was energetic, sweet and innocent. I searched for references on the internet that could help me to figure out my idea. You can see my main references in Fig.01 and here's what I used each one for:

a. Swimming suit
b. Understanding how water reacts to light
c. Posing
d. Facial expression
e. Hat
f. Hat



I'd used this character in three other illustrations, so she was already modeled in modo and rigged in Maya, which made posing the body for this image easy (Fig.02). To create the rig I used a free Mel script I found on creativecrash.com named ”Advanced Skeleton” – you can find it here:

http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/animation/c/advancedskeleton