Insomnia-fueled self-indulgance

95% of the time insomnia just plain sucks. You just sit around being miserable without the energy to do anything. Tonight I a got a self-portrait out of it, though. Fun fun, haven't done a portrait in a couple of years.

First evening with zspheres

Quick little post today.

I've been trying out zspheres tonight. It's supposed to be a good way to quickly sculpt muscle, so I used one of the skulls I made to make a face. On the plus side the base anatomy was sort of useful, but I'm not sure it's very time-efficient. You basically build up the musculature, which takes a lot of time, then you merge it and spend the rest of the evening trying to do to the resulting mesh what skin and fat does to the human face while fixing the myriad of errors.

So no, not completely sold on the concept. But I'm guessing it's a lot more useful when sculpting, say, a dragon or something.

I'm not super-happy with how it's going, but it is kind of cool to see what sort of face results from sculpting over an already existing skull.

When I see an elephant fly...

Ok, so I kind of felt like posting something a bit more fun than the skulls, so I sat down and sketched a bit.

It's, uh, Ganesha as interpreted by someone who's been watching way to may wuxia films when he had a cold. Everything is still super-rough and the anatomy is all over the place since I'm still in the "trying stuff out" phase, but I'm already having some fun with it. I'm thinking about bulking him out a bit. I was going for "skinny, with distended stomach" but I'm not sure that works, really. I also think the ornamentation on the belt is way to finicky  It works up close, but already at this distance it kind of just becomes a mess of detail.

First Post!

Hi there!

If you're here that probably means that I sent you here and that you already know me. So I'll cut right to it and tell you what this blog is for: It's basically somewhere I plan to post stuff I've been working on in my spare time and I'll try to do it on a semi-regular schedule. That means that unlike with a proper portfolio I'll post a lot of unfinished stuff here. 

Some of it will be bad, uninspired, pretentious and/or generally awful.

Some of it might turn out alright. 

I'd love any feedback you could give me. I guess you could say that's the point of this blog is to become better, unlike a portfolio which exists to show the quality of the things I've already done.

So anyway! I'll start off with tonight's project: Skull studies! (Whooo)

This was for an assignment  in a webinar course I'm attending. Basically we were to take a bunch of zbrush primitives and sculpt three humanoid skulls with a lot of variation in them.  I wanted to sculpt a wide range of "normal" humans. So I chose to sculpt a European female, and an Asian and African male. I included the references from boneclones.com. I spent way to much time on the first one (the European female) so the other two are kind of rushed. I didn't spend much time on the teeth either, they're mostly just there so that they are.