DEAD

Alright, I'm calling it. This blog is officially sentenced to lay at the bottom of the internet, letting the heavy currents wash over it as time pushes ever forward. Unseen at the murky depths but for the seldom traveler in search of some distraction from the time and the currents... ever unseen. ever present.

Bird of Prey, DONE!

Bird of Prey wings!

Finally finished the wings. There's one more layer of detail that goes on the top and bottom of both, but I'll do that later. It's coming along pretty well so far. I can't wait to start the head of this thing!

Bird of Prey

No, I haven't forgotten about the ZBrush Bird of Prey. In fact I've been waiting until my new office was finished to get back to it. I'm doing ZBrush in a dedicated office with hardwood floors and four windows of natural light for the first time EVER. It was well worth the wait. As you can see, I've completed the the wing gun assembly. So, this is the first finished piece of the Bird of Prey! 

Fun fact: the disruptor mounts are not completely identical. They have slight differences from the left wing to the right. It's cool, since I never noticed on the studio model, but it's annoying knowing I have more work to do on the almost identical left wing.

ZBrush Project 04: Klingon Bird of Prey

Behold! The humble beginnings of a fully detailed Klingon Bird of Prey!

Mother's Day Vase

This Mother's day, I was presented with the task of sculpting her a vase. This was set to me by my brother and sounded like a good idea at the time. 

I found a nice twisty Dial soap bottle at Wal-Mart. I have to mail this off, so I can't use any actual glass here.

I cut off the top and sanded the entire bottle with 400 grit sandpaper to give it that frosted glass look. I then sculpted the outside in three different sections. I let each section cure for 4 hours between them so I could handle the bottle easier with each new sculpt. 

I then painted the outside and clear coated the wood. I'm not terribly happy about how this came out. I wish I had one more week with it before I had to ship it out. It's good enough for what it is, but it feels rushed. Paint can make or break a sculpt. In this case, I think it's the latter.

Queen of Death!

My next sculpting project "Queen of Death". I took reference photos of my fiancee in this pose to get the proportions right, but the legs look too small? She's going to be kneeling on one knee, lifting up her corpse dog from a severed arm just like we do with our stupid dogs with socks and rope toys. 

I want her to seem a bit timeless, so no stupid outfit. She's just going to be wearing very basic decayed cloth and furs. I thought it would be cool if she wore a belt of various animal skull eye sockets sown together. Her crown, being the queen of death, has to feature many animals, so she's got the horns of an antelope in front, rabbit ears on either side in the middle, and reindeer horns in the back. Her wings will be a torn apart raven wing and a torn apart bat wing. The top of her crown will be adorned with various coins and eyeball tokens she's collected over the infinite time.

Critiques are welcome! Please help before I start sculpting and get in too deep!

Daily Drawings 1

Plugging away on daily drawings. For the most part I knock these out during breaks at work. Sometimes the short time frame works for me, sometimes it works against me. Still, it feels good to say I MADE something each day (storyboards for work aside)

Comicon promises...

It's time to start the next actual hand sculpted thingy. This one's going to be just a sculpted figure on a base. No crazy illustration. But it's going to be the most detailed realistic piece I've EVER done. This comes from something I promised myself while walking the crowded halls of Comicon last year. I passed by a both and saw this:

It was so detailed, so perfect. A master sculpted this. I wondered if I could do something like it. "No!" I said to myself. "I'm going to do this!" I promised right then and there I would do a super detailed realistic sculpture. The title of this piece is "Queen of the Dead".

Here's the first set of sketches for her:

Of course I like the top right hand one the most. The curly circle-y things atop her crown are eyeballs and coins. I want the crown to be topped with various antlers and horns. Not rams horns though. That's been done to death. I Googled 'queen of hell' and 'queen of death'. Everything that's been done is pretty lame with a few and far between exceptions. Mostly people illustrate a beautiful busty woman with some revealing black skin tight outfit and a couple of spiky accents. BAH! I say to that! BAH!

Next step is to figure out what the hell she's doing and in what pose. 

To hell with Minecraft! I've got ZBrush!

It took 3 weeks to create, paint and assemble all these accurate Lego pieces into this scene. I went a bit far... I even added the little Lego logo to all studs just like the real ones. 

This one scene ended up being over 9 MILLION polygon points. To put that into perspective, Santa was just a whisper above 4 million. And he had subtle skin line textures and tiny divets and dimples.

I learned how to change the background color, control the lighting (a little bit) and MOST importantly, I learned how to apply texture mapping using the Spotlight feature! All by myself!!!!!

Daily Draw February 2014

Very well. If that is the way the winds are blowing, let no one say I don't also blow. -Mayor Quimby

What better way to celebrate my upcoming gallery show than by devoting the next month to MORE drawing? Satellite Soda is about to start it's yearly Daily Draw February. It's exactly what it sounds like. Start drawing, because reasons!

Getting the hang of this....

Alright! I'm finally getting the hang of this! The Roman coin took about three days from start to finish and the Lego Minifigure took about two nights! Oh ZBrush... I'll chase you round the moons of Nibia and round the Antares Maelstrom and round Perditions flames before I give you up!

The Gallery Show Continues

Still plugging away. I've been looking at Fabien Mense's work a lot lately. He colors his work digitally in a way that feels a lot like marker or watercolor. After finding a photoshop brush that captures a similar look I decided to recolor my pieces for the gallery show. Here's Blaster Master and a finished Link.

Upcoming Gallery Show

A new year and a new opportunity to actually draw more! My wife roped me in to doing a gallery show at our local coffee shop in February. I decided to use it as an opportunity to continue my video game series. Originally these were all just going to be simple black and white illustrations, but because they'll be printed and hung a wall I want to add a splash of color. I have this weird addiction to halftones so I'm using Photoshop's three-color halftone filter and offsetting it slightly to give it that Sunday morning comics feel. I guess I could say it reinforces the retro-ness of the subject matter, but really I just have a hard-on for halftones...

IMAGINE SANTA! IMAGINE SANTA NOW!

I finished what, to me, is the first professional looking Zbrush project I've done. This one has it all! Sculpted all around, incorporating multiple subtools, it has subtle skin textures, an attempt at hair (the weakest part) and even a cloth texture in the hat! I did this one entirely from scratch. This started off as simply a sphere. My next step is to color it and 3D print it!

Happy Thanksgiving Everybody!

Sketches from Cadiz, Spain

Well, I did it. I actually sketched in Europe. Granted I didn't do much sketching.... but that's besides the point.

 First, The homeless guy who would set up right outside our apartment every morning. This is at the end of the street, just a few buildings down. Normally, I would never be able to draw someone face on (I can't bring myself to do that), but I was able to do this from my little balcony. Under that is one of the bells from the cathedral tower. Next to that is a horrible first attempt. Bah.

I tried drawing people around the cathedral square, but it ended up being a page of people sitting, facing away from me. So I decided to change things up. I walked down the street to the post office and decided to draw people walking. This is a very good exercise to loosen yourself up since you only have about 10 seconds to draw someone. It's more about getting the gesture than anything else. 

Right before we left for the shipyards, there was a 4 hour long 'bridge strike'. No taxis were able to take us anywhere. So we sat in the shade of the cathedral and waited. I took the opportunity to get another page in.

Finally, this was in the historic district of the Navantia shipyards. They had three old boats, up on supports, supposedly from the 20s. (though I've never been able to find anything about them online). This was one of the wooden hulled boats, clad with copper plates. Every inch of it was decay and weathering the likes of which I've never seen before. 

3d Logo Printed!!!

YEAH!!! Wooooo!

Spaceship 3: Blueprints

I've been working nightshift, so it's taken much much longer to make these blueprints than I intended. This is more or less what the ship will look like from the side. I'm using the top of a pretzel jar to make the front clear dome. Now I can start building!

Spaceship 3

   These are the rough sketches of my next project. I'm sculpting and lighting a space island cruise ship. Right now, I'm drawing out 1:1 scale blueprints. I intend to have fiber optic lights, LEDs and clear plastic domes for the various island sections.