So, earlier I made avampire skull. That smiling fucker has been looking pretty damn lonely, so it seemed the only option I had was to create him a buddy. In sticking with the hybrid skull mashup fuckery, I decided to put my spin on another classic movie monster before I start taking the hybrids to more surreal territories. Here is my stab at a scientifically accurate werewolf mid-transformation:
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As usual, I sculpted this entirely from scratch in ZBrush. It was printed life-size in resin on an Anycubic M3, painted with acrylics, and the teeth were given a shine with clear uv resin. The stand was also created in ZBrush, then printed in filament on the Anycubic Kobra Max and accented with black felt. Here are some more pics:
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This was a fun one that I had to treat like a puzzle. While there are some similarities between canine and human skulls, there are also plenty of contradicting landmarks. Using one of my human skulls and one of my canine skulls as reference, I did my best to imagine what a midway morph between the opposing landmarks of each skull, then model it while trying to maintain a sense of believability and interesting flowing forms. For example, rather than shooting the muzzle of the wolf directly outward, I decided to bring it out and downward at an angle. This helped form a strong silhouette and maintained wolf and human readability (at least to me anyway.) Bringing the muzzle straight out would have looked cartoonish-like a human skull with a tacked-on muzzle. I also decided to keep the nasal cavity and majority of the teeth more human than not, since the eye sockets, canines, sagittal crest, and zygomatics were already leaning very wolfish.
That’s all the energy I have for now. I’ll be back one of these days, most likely with another hybrid skull at some point.
Howdy! I’ve been nitpickingly tweaking a few of my older original models recently, particularly the skulls (one of which I previously said I was going to stop messing with!) While I won’t post THAT one again, this one is still fair game:
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Since I’ve printed the old version, I see it every day. Naturally, I just kept seeing things I wished I had done differently. This almost neurotic dissatisfaction added up enough over time to prompt me into opening ZBrush and giving my model another work-over. As I didn’t like the angry shape of the eyes, I widened them (to me, a hint of sadness in this piece is far creepier than an angry brow.) I followed my references closely modeling this the first time, and didn’t really add any embellishments to it–this worked out fairly well, but I wanted to see if I could push it a little more to create a little more pleasing and coherent form. Without using reference this time (I wasn’t going to bastardize the already established anatomy I have already laid out…too much), I widened the nasal cavity, extended the muzzle, fattened and elongated the back of the head, and went ape-shit adding more distress marks and battle scars. I then made a life-size print and tweaked my color scheme…again. I’m happy with it now, but who knows how I’ll feel after staring at it every day for some time…
Hello. Well, winter depression hit about as soon as it was time to winterize the motorcycles, and that killed any motivation I had for a while. Fortunately, I could still come up with several ideas to try to motivate myself to get up off my ass, cherry-picked my favorite, and spent way too much time bringing it to life. I purchased a HUGE resin printer (the Anycubic M3 Max) a few months ago while it was on sale. It sat, unopened, in its obscenely giant box – taking up half of my tiny kitchen space – for a couple months before I could finally gather the motivation and courage to sculpt something large enough to justify opening it. Being either ballsy or stupid or a bit of both, I skipped the test print stage and printed this giant sonofabitch. Somehow, it all worked out without a hitch:
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Hopefully it shows, but in case you cannot tell what you are looking at, my idea was to make a life-sized human/vampire bat hybrid skull. I wanted to go for extreme accuracy and realism–melding recognizable features of each into one coherent package. This meant sculpting a brand-new human skull around the teeth and nose and ear bones of a vampire bat, then creating a jaw that could function around these strange new shapes.
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The lower jaw was indeed a challenge, as neither the human nor bat jaw as they stand in real life could rotate on their hinges properly while clearing the giant teeth, and still have the bat’s characteristic under-bite, but I believe I came up with a solution that looks as good as I could make it, and more importantly, one that functions.
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And since I like the look of this model much more with its mouth in the open position, I decided to use my terrible woodworking skills and rudimentary woodworking tools to butcher some oak and felt and make a stand for it.
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This took approximately 70ish hours to sculpt in ZBrush using one of my real human skulls and several pictures of vampire bat skulls as references.
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The print itself in the Anycubic M3 Max printer took about 24 hours and over 1kg of resin. Unfortunately, the autofill did not work, so every three hours for 24 hours I needed to manually top off the resin vat. Sleep was severely lacking that day…
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Once the print finished, it was yet another several hours cleaning up and curing the clear resin print, but at that point I was happy to do so as the largest print I ever attempted on a brand new printer actually worked!
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Finally, it was time for painting. I started with a base coat of some paint and primer spray paint in a matte ivory silk color, and then, once that was dry, attacked it with a paintbrush and acrylics followed by a bunch of washes and sponge dabbing and dry brushing. When that was dry, I applied some matte clear-coat and painted over the teeth with epoxy to give them a realistic shine.
I don’t hate it. The amount of work put into this was obscene, but I ticked off something I have been wanting to do since I was a child: I sculpted a realistic life-sized skull that doesn’t look like complete shit. That has to count for something, right?
Ok, this is the last I am doing with that damned skull model I made a while back and have been unrelentingly spamming lately. I really, truly, probably mean it this time! I tweaked a few more things, then chopped his face off and sculpted him a simple frame in ZBrush. I merged everything together into one piece and printed a life-sized version in resin, then finished it with some cheap-ass acrylic paints and old brushes. Here he is:
Woot! After a couple weeks of slaving away in ZBrush, I’m finally done with this one, and I am actually thrilled with how it turned out!!! There was a quick detour when I decided I liked where one particular aspect of the model turned out, so I took a couple of my 3D printers out of hibernation and put them to work. I will attach a few pictures of how that turned out on here too. But first, “Inevitable Carcinization”:
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And here is an alternate render to fix several things I found crappy with my first attempt:
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If you’re not sure of what carcinization is, and you have any interest at all in bizarre evolution, I’d strongly recommend looking it up. Basically, Wikipedia defines it as this:
Carcinisation (or carcinization) is an example of convergent evolution in which a crustacean evolves into a crab-like form from a non-crab-like form. The term was introduced into evolutionary biology by L. A. Borradaile, who described it as “one of the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab”.
This whole thing started as a skull study in ZBrush. I own several human skulls, which yes, I legally purchased. These provide excellent reference for not only figuring out how to draw and sculpt (skullpt?) skulls, but also give an insanely huge insight and appreciation to the underlying form of the human head. If you ever draw or paint or sculpt anything with an underlying skeletal system, I can’t recommend enough doing tons of skull studies. Anyways, I used the structures of several of my skulls as a reference to sculpt the skull model. I was going for accuracy. When I was finished modeling the skull portion, I was more than pleased with the result, and as previously mentioned, I decided to make a resin print of it and paint it up all ugly brown, before completing the illustration. Here’s how that turned out:
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Soon after finishing the skull, I took yet another detour from the illustration and created a stand for it. I opened ZBrush and attempted to make it a stylish quasi-mannequin head type of stand. This was printed in my filament printer using PLA, as detail wasn’t so important and cleanup is 100x easier than resin. Here’s how that turned out:
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Now back to the illustration. Everything was sculpted and painted in ZBrush, except for the sky. This model had over 19 million polygons, so it became quite burdensome and sluggish to detail, but I pushed through. I painted the sky in Rebelle, rendered the entire scene in Keyshot, and color-corrected and added noise in Affinity photo. I have gotten to where I try to do as much in ZBrush, using only the default tools, as possible. It feels like things are more cohesive the less I have to paint over them in other programs.
And that, friends, is two whole posts in one short month! Thanks for reading this far, and take care!
254 years ago I decided it might be a wise idea to start an “art” blog. Inspired by a friend’s art blog, it was my thinking that having one of my own might motivate me to make more art. For about five minutes, this seemed to actually work! And on the sixth minute, after a sickeningly meager amount of posts, my attention waned, life happened, then came the bouts of overtime at work, then the stress of that pathetic clown-show and all the drama associated with the last presidential election, and finally I went and got myself good and sick.
Currently I am feeling much better, am somehow not on overtime (yet) this week, and it occurs to me that I have this blog thing that I have been horribly neglecting for a bit too long. So, I decided to use this post as a dumping ground for the few things I have been working on so I can move forward with some new shit. Without further ado…
HOAX
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This skull was sculpted from scratch in Zbrush. I used one of my human skulls and my dog skull as a reference while sculpting. I tried to combine attributes of each in an anatomical way that looked like it might really be able to work in nature. The parietal portion of the skull came from my imagination. I pictured an almost werewolf style creature while sculpting this, but now that I look at it, it resembles a baboon. Go figure…an amorous gentleman and a scandalous dog hook up for a night of unadulterated debauchery and a goddamn baboon is the end product of that questionable coupling. They probably taught that in 4th grade science class on the one day I wasn’t paying attention.
Anyways, I printed this on my Photon Mono X printer, painted it with acrylics, and created a stand for it with wire, felt, and some Magic Sculpt epoxy putty. Here are a couple more shots in various stages of painting:
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Now onto the next…
Parasite: “Nymph Redux”
You might remember this creature from a previous post. I was quite happy with how it turned out, but after so long the coating on my rose-tinted glasses started to peel away, and I found more and more things I wished I had done differently. Luckily I saved the Zbrush file I created, so I opened it back up and retweaked it. I have not printed this yet, but I did manage to produce a Keyshot render.
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…and what’s this? Another parasite?!
Parasite: “Slugm’n”
Again, another made from scratch Zbrush sculpt I printed on my Epax X1 3D printer and finished with acrylics, some wire, and Magic Sculpt epoxy Putty. Nothing too special here, except maybe his sassy snarky smirk. I do like his paint-job a little too.
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Oh, he also has a backstory: The Slugm’n is just a happy, albeit “bitchy” little guy who lives in YOUR inner ear – or as he likes to call it, his bathroom…there’s no such thing as earwax. He whispers all sorts of random gibberish to you that can only be heard right as you’re falling asleep; you know, the type of shit that makes sense until a neighbor honks or a dog barks or the neighborhood children toss a brick at your window as part of their heathen rituals, then you jolt awake with four inches of drool dangling from your dirty little mouth and wonder just what in the fuck those stupid voices were telling you. Yes, the Slugm’n is also an asshole.
Ok, we’re almost at the end of this post. Now is finally the time for:
MAD PROPS!!!
I have two, count them, TWO art friends. Both of these friends have recently accomplished something awesome, so this is me bragging about BOTH of my only art friends. In no particular order, here they are:
The first is my friend John Douglas. He is the guy who inspired me to start this damned blog in the first place and introduced me to life drawing. He is an exceptional artist who just keeps improving. Recently, he completed the album cover and highly stylized profile pictures for the Netherlands death metal band “Buried” on their brand new “Oculus Rot” album. View his post HERE. It is fricking awesome!
The next person I have to give mad props to is my friend Michelle Brost. She is an amazing 2D animator and an animation instructor at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She recently finished a very surreal and beautiful animated film that was just accepted by the GLAS Animation Festival in LA.!
I am so proud of both of these people and honored and lucky to call them my friends. They both provide me with more inspiration than they could ever know. And they’re both from Minnesota…hrmmmm…must be something in the air there. Might be the time to consider moving…
And just like that, this post is FINALY done!!!
Mask up, stay safe, and don’t be an asshole. Shit will get better.
Guess who is on vacation for the week! Time to make a post (overtime has only gotten worse during this fucking pandemic, and that along with rattled nerves and major sleep deprivation, temporarily murdered any motivation and creativity I might have had.) It was time to make something…anything. I decided to fire up ZBrush and make another 3D print, as I was quite happy with my last effort.
Here is what I wound up with:
Click to view full resolution.
Click to view full resolution.
There’s not much that can make me too terribly uneasy, but if one wanted to turn my stomach, show me a picture or a video of a parasite that can lay its eggs in you, or lives in your eyeball, or your colon, or in any other way breaches the human epidermis. These almost alien creatures – as repulsive as they are – have a way of also being fascinating to me. The sheer number of unique physical traits these little bastards have so that they may efficiently violate us upright apes in one foul way or another, can’t NOT inspire me.
So I decided to make a parasite… I gave myself a challenge. It had to be “fleshy,” mammalian, and answer the question “just what the fuck is causing the random stinging itches that have the ability to wake a person from a deep sleep?” I decided that the creature needed a long hollow tongue for piercing the skin so that it could drink the blood, and as added insult to injury, it then defecates and urinates into that very same wound from its tongue. It truly is a multi-purpose tool! Its means of locomotion are unknown to me, as this specimen is just a nymph and hasn’t fully developed yet, but I have to assume that it’s tendrils, tongue and tail allow it to slither/crawl. In the middle of sculpting I realized I was making yet another fetus-looking thing…while thinking about parasites…hrmmmmmm…
ZBrush sculpt and model prepared with print supports in Chitubox
So, yeah…The model took about 8 hours to sculpt in ZBrush, another hour to build the print supports and slice it into over 2000 layers for print in Chitubox, and another 9 hours to print (I won’t mention the additional 7 hours the first print that failed wasted…). I built the base with Magic Sculpt epoxy putty and wire, then attached everything with epoxy. I used my cheap-ass acrylic paints in multiple layers and washes and dry-brushing. I them sealed the paint with polyurethane spray, and then painted the eyes and tongue with 5-minute epoxy for the wet-looking shine. Once again, I learned some more things I can and can’t get away with in modeling in ZBrush and support building. It was a good experience overall, and hopefully enough to stave off some guilt over my recent lack of creativity.
I’ll try like hell to get something else on here before my vacation ends.
Be safe, and if you start itching in your sleep…now you know what is causing it!
So, I got a small 3D resin printer – an Epax X1 for those who care for the details. After fooling around a bit printing other people’s models (mostly small animal skull scans found on Thingiverse) to get used to it, I was finally ready to make this original little bastard:
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This was based on a drawing that my 4 year old niece Quinn (who wants to be an “art” when she grows up) made. She was practicing doing side profiles, and created this ridiculous pointy-nosed and stone-toothed poor little terrified looking guy. I was in awe of this picture and knew that I needed to do something with it when I began to ponder what a slightly more realistic version of it would look like. Here’s her original:
The original drawing of a side profile by my 4 year old niece Quinn that served as the inspiration for my model.
I spent a couple hours a day for several days (thanks forced overtime!!!) re-learning the basics of ZBrush as it has changed radically over the years…and my memory is eroding fast. I then took the resulting 3D model and added the printing supports and did the rest of the preparation in Chitubox. Here are a few shots of the model from a few different angles and a picture of the model with added supports:
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Once the print was done (about 8 hours print time) I cleaned up the model, painted it with acrylic, spray varnished it, and added epoxy to the eyes and teeth to give them some shine.
This was a very fun project that couldn’t have been done without Quinn’s original illustration. The anatomy was a challenge as the lack of any arms or wings really messed with my already limited upper body anatomy. My limited ZBrush knowledge was also improved as I ran into several situations that I needed to find solutions for. Now if I can just continue using these things I learned, I may be able to retain some of them!!!
I do plan on stealing collaborating with Quinn some more in the future, as she is a goddamn maniac “art”. I also plan on using ZBrush more, and maybe make a few more odd little models. But for now, I sleep. Being “essential” blows!
idrawcrap 