Sculpt January 2019: Day 1-6

As promised, I'm going to write just a short paragraph for each piece, because I'm really short on time these days (I'm still finalizing the last render as I type this). But before I forget, here are the links for my 2018 reel and 2017 reel. 

And now to the sculpting.

Day 1: Beast - Deep Sea

This one was a nightmare. It was one of those days where everything falls apart the moment you touch it. And I'm ashamed to say that at one point I fell apart and I went down the I'm-a-terrible-artist-and-I-really-should-stop-doing-this-if-I-can't-get-it-right-after-two-years-of-daily-work rabbit hole. But I picked myself up, I finished the render and I continued with the challenge.

Day 2: Mood - Delight

Here I decided to sculpt a little girl because up to that moment I only made male sculptures. I found out that there is a very thin line between looking delighted and terrified. I started over four times but I eventually made it look somewhat acceptable. I still haven't learned how to sculpt mouths, though. I don't know what's so daunting about them, but I just can't get the shape right. On the other hand, this is my first sculpture that has a human-looking profile (I seem to forget that foreheads exist).

Day 3: Body - Chest

One of my better sculptures this week. I watched some anatomy drawing lessons before I started sculpting, and it definitely helped. Still, it's a long way off from a correct looking body. Oh, and I gave her a bra, because nipples are scary and dangerous nowadays. I used the RetopoFlow add-on to create a quick mesh for it, and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. I might even use the torso for my future clothing attempts.

Day 4: Attribute - Rotten

I didn't know what I was going to make for this one. I thought everyone was going to post rotten apples and I wanted to come up with something more original. I considered several other scenes: rotting meat on a fully set table, or one of those succulents whose flowers smell like rotten meat (I even did a blockout for that one). But in the end I went for a cartoonish look and I'm glad I did. One of the few renders in my collection that has some sort of story going on.

Day 5: Objects - Spherical

This one proved to be the most popular in the Facebook group, although I have to admit that I'm not that pleased with it myself. I was aiming for a much cuter looking owl. But I did get a lot of room to practice details (all the little feathers are sculpted by hand). And I used dirty vertex colours to make them pop a lot more - the material lifts the whole piece, I think. Fun fact: I cut her beak off because I wanted to make it more shiny and I couldn't do it in the vertex colour painting. But it's a statue, so it's OK. No owls were hurt in the process.

Day 6: Minimalistic - Tiny

I seriously struggled to come up with a topic for this one. Google searches were giving me a lot of examples of ridiculously tiny food. Pizzas, hamburgers, even a full Sunday lunch that can fit on top of your fingers. As I was thinking along these lines, I figured I wanted to try making a tangerine piece, because of the veins (or whatever you call the white lines). I used I trick I learned recently - I didn't sculpt the veins at first, I just drew them with the masking brush. Then I kept smoothing things by adding geometry as needed, switching between the mask and its inverted version. I must have done at least five passes on this. Then, with the mask still on, I inflated and carved different pieces of the tangerine to make the lines appear. 

Overall, I think the first week has been a success. Surprisingly, I started to enjoy the daily change in topics (even though it's almost always a struggle to quickly decide on what to make). I might even do this again in the future, after January ends. Well, maybe I shouldn't be hasty, I haven't pushed through the whole event yet. Well, let's see how the next week goes, shall we? See you next time!