First one’s after Josh Hall’s sketch.

Just blowing some steam. I’ve been playing around with an awesome, new, FREE 3D sculpting program Sculptris. 3D is kind of a guilty pleasure for me since what I do never seems to amount to anything worth showing because the end results are rarely anything artistically interesting.

3D has however helped me flex artistic muscles that I rarely use otherwise – and working with lighting, texturing and, now, sculpting has helped me gain a better understanding of how light works, for instance. So it’s not complete waste of time and it’s fun.

This image is just a bunch of screengrabs from Sculptris combined in Photoshop with some post-processing to add shading, colors, texture and BLOOOOOOD. So no fancy rendering here.

Forgot to add an apron and a hat, though.

I’ve been playing with the idea of setting up a scene in DAZ Studio and using a render as a reference for an illustration but haven’t gotten around to doing so until now. This time I did, however, and it really worked in my advantage regarding speed and probably outcome too. Much less thinking involved when it came to perspective, foreshortening and shading – even though this still just a sketch and a bit funky in places.

In case you don’t happen to know what DAZ Studio is, it is much like the better know Poser except that it’s FREE. You just need to register (again, for free) at the DAZ website, and you’ll be able to download your own copy. There’s a ton of free content available – including figures, clothing, hair, props – in sites like Renderosity.com or ShareCG.com as well as DAZ’s own website – because for the most part DS uses the same files as Poser.

Essentially what you do with DS is clothe and pose a figure, possibly include some props, add lighting and then render the scene. It’s like a “virtual photo studio”. It’s easy to use and good fun actually, I’ve ended up wasting spending a lot of time playing around with learning the program myself.

… and you’ve got hell to pay for it.

Another one for the CTT.

Don’t worry, it happens to the best of us. More often to the worst, though.

For Illustration Friday’s theme "Foggy" and slightly inspired by this. (And apparently someone beat me to it slightly with his "vampire zombie" comment. Vampire zombie?).

I could add, though, that I did some digging around with my old sketches, and this is actually based on a quick sketch from 2005. He used to be a card shark, snake-oil salesman or something like that back then, though.

From left to right: Bad cropping due to bad planning (i.e. the lack of it),
the guy I would love to see take on the Black Knight (stay tuned for a sequel)
and the said general nonsense (and a mandatory zombie).

  

It’s good to be prepared.

Reading the book also reminded me that I had my own zombie survivor that had to be dealt with. This lovely zombie-basher needed a background and I finally got myself around for doing one. So here it is.