Soft Blue - Sculpt Pt.1

 04-11/02/22 - Week 5

Last Friday I started my 3rd and final sculpt, this is my character that will be the most stylised out of the 3 and features less realistic proportion, the style itself is very smooth and rather cute so it will be an interesting contrast from my previous sculpt. I started by collecting some style reference and also sketching out a rough estimate of what the front and side views would look like. For my style reference for this project I was looking at recent disney/pixar films as this has the very soft look with large eyes and a small nose being one of the main features.

I also came up with a very rough version of the face which obviously had a lot of issues, but it was mainly a way to get a basic map for myself so I could improve and find the mistakes on Monday. 

I worked on these issues at the beginning of the week, figuring out the correct proportions of the face and where I was originally going wrong such as the nose and overall face shape. I used the same method as the last project, slowly working on it and comparing it directly with the reference in the same angle. Eventually I came to something much more resembling of the original concept and so I continued on to finish the face area, added in the horns and the details on the face.

On Tuesday I managed to finish the whole body as I wanted to in my plan, I again tried to make this closely resemble the concept's style but I did end up struggling a bit with the proportions as the head is rather large for the body which was throwing me off. I ended on the below by the end of the day though eventually I did end up making the head larger and the neck longer to try to get it a bit closer to what I was seeing in the concept. Another part that I struggled with was the feet, I wanted them to be accurate to the concept as mentioned, which includes a very stylistic impression of the feet with only the big toe being separated. This meant that it was a bit harder to make it look right and take reference from my anatomical references since the concept had played with this so much. I think eventually I came to something that looks like the concept whilst also looking like a foot.

Over Wednesday and Thursday I moved on to the clothing and hair, I used the same brush from my professional brief to create the hair but tried to use it to match the concepts style by adding a bit more detail and layers. I also chose to sculpt the pigtails rather than create them with the brush as I felt it was quicker and resembled the hair's flow from the concept a lot better.

You can find the brush at this link: https://academy.artheroes.co/imm-brush-for-stylized-hair?fbclid=IwAR3ixwYVenxh4vHiuJyM4LIRBJe32NYJPbjIi-Sxxj5g9tZGUixWULrU4Jo

Credit to Art Heroes and Marlon R. Nuñez as the creators and distributors for this brush.

I wanted to try to add a lot more of a stylised feel to the clothing and I achieved this by making each clothing part out of several meshes to give it clean cut edges and more depth. I really like the way this impacted the clothing though it did mean things were a little more fiddly and time consuming.

On Friday I worked towards finishing the character, I added in the wings and some of the details such as the rope belt and parts coming out from the skirt. The wings were probably the trickiest to make, though I ended up approaching these by creating the shape form a mask on a plane and then using zmodeler to extrude this. I had to do this several times for each part of the wing and it did take a while to get it to look right though I think I have managed to come up with something that resembles the wings from the concept.

This is where I currently am with this project, I am hoping to manage to finish on Monday as my plan last week stated, I only have the very smallest details left to do. I am pretty happy with my progress this week and I feel that the quality of my work has improved and sped up so I am able to have a bit more time for quality control.