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.