Sculpt January 2019: Day 14-20

This week's renders turned out slightly better than I expected (well, most of them, anyway), but maybe the ideas behind them weren't that innovative. Which is OK, though, because this challenge is meant to be about improving your sculpting skills, and not (necessarily) about creating the most amazing art pieces. With that said, however, I do wish that the topics were more concrete. I think that those we have this year are guiding people away from honing their skills and towards coming up with cool ideas. (Something I'm notoriously bad at, so feel free to disregard this paragraph completely.)

Day 14: Motion - Flexing

This is probably my best human figure so far. And a posed one as well. I had to trace a background image to get to this level of credibility but I still think this is a useful technique at this stage—it's better than to keep creating people with wrong proportions and memorising those errors. The only thing that bothers me a bit is that the parts of her you can't see... enjoyed far less attention than those you can see. But with more practice I should be able to do a full sculpt in a couple of hours.

Day 15: Beast - Hybrid

This is where I started to struggle topic-wise. There are plenty of mythical hybrids that I'd love to create; each of them more time-consuming than the next. In the end I tremulously picked a concept made by Alyssa Veysey (The Art of VeyZ). I have been amazed by her creations for a while now, so I desperately wanted to do her concept justice. I hope that it turned out alright and that I'll be able to breathe life into more of her fantastic creatures in the future.

Day 16: Mood - Melancholy

This was the longest sculpt of the week. It took me around 4 hours, if I remember correctly. I even went as far as to pose for it myself. I quite like the result, although the lighting isn't great. It's a combination of matcap sculpture and regularly textured background and it just doesn't fit very well. But I was out of time and fully texturing the girl would have taken ages. So, there.

Day 17: Body - Hand pose

I'm a bit upset with this one. Hands are one of the few body parts that I feel I'm able to create reasonably well—so of course I didn't. Too much work to cram into the 2 hours I set for myself (after the exhausting sculpt of the previous day). I created a single finger, rigged it, duplicated and positioned it, booleaned it together with a rounded cube for the palm and a couple of metaballs... and then ruined it by sculpting on top of it. I know that the masking tool exists, but I'm usually too lazy to use it, so I regularly end up with distorted geometry. Serves me right.

Day 18: Attribute - Damaged

I went through a lot of options in my head before I settled on the shoe, but I quite enjoyed sculpting it. I might have spent more time on the base than on detailing the sculpture, but I tried to keep this one as short as possible too (final time was 1h 30, I think). It would work even better with proper materials— maybe I'll revisit it at some point in the future.

Day 19: Objects - Obscure

And the nightmare of the week award goes to... Yeah, there is always at least one, isn't there? I spent ages trying to find something that would fit the topic, and I really struggled with it. I have no idea what the authors had in mind when they came up with this, and judging by the comments on Facebook, neither does majority of the people who managed to submit something so far. Oh, and if it is too obscure to be recognisable, first of all, well done me, and second, it is the rune stones from the Stardust film. (One of my favourites.)

Day 20: Minimalistic - Split

Another topic where my mind went blank. But this time I rebelled and went for a different interpretation—and not very minimalistic at that, ha! I've never had a banana split, but Google says this is what it looks like and who am I to argue. The whipped cream is more of an oddly blobbed white cement, but I was rushing as usual and this was the only way to keep the whole project under 2 hours.

And this is all, ladies and gentlemen. There are going to be two more weeks of this (well, technically a week and a half, but I'm going to use the first few days of February to catch up with my extensive tutorial queue). I have hatched a plan for February, which is partly based on what I've been doing this month, but I'm not going to spoil it quite yet. See you next week!