Homo Lupus: My take on a realistic werewolf skull

So, earlier I made a vampire 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:

click for full size

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:

click for full size
click for full size
click for full size
click for full size
click for full size

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.

Here’s a Keyshot render, because, why not?:

click for full size

Homo Desmodus Too: My Second Take on a Realistic Vampire Skull

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:

Click for full size
Click for full size
Click for full size

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…

If you’d like to view the original version: https://idrawcrap.wordpress.com/2023/11/08/homo-desmodus-my-take-on-a-realistic-vampire-skull/

Babycakes

This one was a surprise even to myself. Immediately after finishing the illustration from the previous post, I had an idea to experiment with atmosphere by rendering fog. The experiment was successful, so I quickly began another ZBrush sculpt to utilize it. I’m pretty happy with the result.

Click for full size

This was completely sculpted in ZBrush over the course of a few days, rendered in Keyshot, and color-tweaked in Affinity Photo.

Thanks for looking! I’ll try my hardest to be back soon, but again, no promises…

Ol’ Gus

This is my first post for 2024, so I best make an apology for a pretty pathetic amount of output in 2023. I haven’t been completely lazy. For the past month, I have been tweaking the design of the vampire bat/human hybrid skull, and sculpted a stand for it, then printed off a couple skulls and stands with the intention of maybe selling an extremely limited run, but we’ll have to see if my motivation picks up enough to paint and finish them.

Anyways, here’s “Ol’ Gus”:

Click for full size

This is another ZBrush sculpt where I went in with no ideas and just kind of went with whatever my stupid brain and hands decided they wanted to do. I rendered it in Keyshot, painted over it slightly in Rebelle, and tweaked the colors in Affinity Photo…as always. I don’t completely hate it, and am actually pretty happy with how that window turned out.

Hope you all have a great 2024! And I’ll be back hopefully sooner than I have been.

Homo Desmodus: My take on a realistic vampire skull

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:

Click for full size

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.

Click for full size

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.

Click for full size

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.

Click for full size

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.

Click for full size

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…

Click for full size

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!

Click for full size

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?

Click for full size

Reunion of the Bastards

Been pretty down and unmotivated lately, but figured I better at least try to do some art and get out of my rut. After dicking around in ZBrush for a while, and hating everything I was coming up with, I decided to break into a low-effort backup plan and do a “reunion” pic. I sculpt every single one of my models starting with either a sphere or cube, and each model takes me tons of hours. I sculpt and detail them from every angle, knowing full-well that the vast majority of that detail will not be in camera view. I then output a single static frame as my result and call it a day. I think about this sometimes and find it a shame that some of my favorite models were either so poorly rendered, or certain details I was so proud of sculpting and painting could not even be seen in the final illustration. I decided that one day I would take some of my favorite models from my past illustrations, and throw them together in a new picture, highlighting or accentuating parts that didn’t get highlighted properly their first time. I just finished that day:

Click for full size

I’m not sure I accomplished what I set out to do, but I ended up spending several more hours tweaking the models and then adjusting the camera settings than I intended, and in the end I kind of like this picture. Figure I better post it…

I did everything in ZBrush, Keyshot, Affinity Photo and Rebelle 6.

…and shit John, I still gotta email you and congratulate you for being featured in Rebelle’s social feed and for getting on the cover of a Marvel cover!!! http://johndouglasart.blogspot.com/2023/05/did-i-accidentally-do-marvel-comics.html

That’s fricking rad!!!

I’ve Been Framed!!!

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:

Click for full size
Click for full size

Now THAT should be the end of this guy!

Triplets

I was fairly lazy in this one as I reused the skull asset I sculpted for “Inevitable Carcinization,” but I wanted to experiment with it some more and make something new…I’m still very proud of that skull. Here’s what I came up with:

Click for full size

I’ll be back soon enough with something new. Thanks for looking!!!

Nest

I’m sore and tired, so this is going to be short. Continuing with my ZBrush, Keyshot, Rebelle, and Affinity Photo trend, here is probably one of my more difficult illustrations. I believe the final polygon count was over 30 million… Anyways, here’s “Nest”:

Click for full size

An update: Once again, I decided to play around with the render a little more and try to style it after my favorite photographer’s work. J.P. Witkin has inspired me almost as much as Giger and Beksinski, though I absolutely suck at photography. He is a photographer with a unique, controversial, dark vision, which helps him create equal parts grotesque and beautiful scratched up black and white photograph artworks. When adjusting contrast and adding noise and chaotic imperfections to my work, Witkin’s work is almost always in my mind. I figured it was time to give him a nod:

Click for full size

I sincerely hope to continue this productivity kick I’ve been on lately. Thanks for looking!