Hello everyone! I'd like to share with you the workflow I used to make this mermaid, from the modeling to the texturing and then the final rendering. The idea of doing this mermaid came when a friend showed me the book Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You and I was fascinated by the colors and shapes. The interesting thing about all this was that when I started modeling I posted some updates on my blog, and soon after that Tony DiTerlizzi (the author of the original image), contacted me asking if he could post them on his blog (http://diterlizzi.com/home/a-masterful-friday-fan-art). I was very glad he enjoyed my work as I'm a big fan of his! Okay, on we go with the Making Of.

Basic Modeling

Because of its elaborate silhouette, I decided to do poly by poly modeling, most of the time in side view and adjusting it in the other views. At the beginning I wanted to follow the true proportions of the mermaid and then give her my personal touch (Fig.01).



When I looked at the drawing, I came up with a question: how would I do her hair? The way I found easiet was to use NURBS. I drew with Curves in side view and used the option to extrude the menu surface. The cool thing about this is that it allowed me to set the thickness of each end, so I left the base thicker and the top thinner (Fig.02).