Yes. You read that right. Dragons.
The significance of the arrival of dragons has to do with the challenges I have in drawing or sculpting them. For some reason I couldn’t get my head around how the wings worked in relation to the arms. I also had trouble with the wing structure. I finally decided that part of my problem might be that I was trying to draw on strictly from imagination and it might help to start by drawing one from a reference of a dragon someone else had drawn. I can’t tell you why it took me this long to figure that out.
I found a fairly simple representation of a dragon and sketched it out. I was a bit surprised and quite pleased with the result.
So from there I decided to start a full dragon in ZBrush. I used a dynamesh sphere and the insert sphere tool these allowed me to add components were I needed more polys to start to layout something like the front feet or the back feet. I did a lot of the shaping with the move brush and ZRemesher. It’s not done by any means but here are a few work in progress shots (WIP).
What I have learned so far is that, now that I am more familiar with the dynamesh sphere and the insert sphere brush, for the next one I will start a little different. I think for the next one I may start with the head and get it nicely blocked in and then add the rest of the body using the insert brushes.
The dragon stayed with me for my morning sketch. This one, completely with out reference in front of me. That’s a good sign I think.
That turned out to be a busy sketch day. Later in the evening I was watching NASA channel and was compelled to make these next couple of sketches. The first being an airplane inspired by a design I saw on the program and the second being a spaceship.
Oh, and those were the last sketches in that particular sketchbook.
The next day and a new sketchbook saw this created.
This one started out with the idea of drawing a triceratops. And then I realized I didn’t have a clear enough picture of what one looks like to do it justice or even hope to get the upper horns right. So it morphed into this creature. It’s a little creepy looking, I think.
This one is kind of cute. And it looks like he’s going somewhere.
I thought drawing a body part would be a good idea. I don’t draw a lot of feet so I figured I could use the practice. In the process some of my ghost lines implied bones so I added them. The idea, I like. However, it did serve to remind me that I may need to do more anatomy studies. And soon.
You may notice the watermarks in the images today. This is new. And I will likely continue to do this. It is a practice that I have known I needed to do for some time and had noticed a friend of mine, who is an artist in Austin, doing this when she posted pics of her paintings. She posted a PSA on Facebook about artists sharing their work online and some of the things we need to do to help protect our work. This is a simple version of a watermark with a copyright on it. There are also digital watermarks and a service that I found that does that is called DigiMarc for Images. There is a fee involved and it’s a little different. But still a good idea.
A finally got the ZBrush to KeyShot Bridge working on Boscoe. This did involve several suggestions from the Pixologic support staff. As well as my providing some detailed
screenshots. And then finally a recommendation to uninstall and reinstall with some specific instructions inbetween of folders to remove. Those specific instructions sent me
poking around in folders and allowed me to find out that the folder was on the C: drive and since I installed on the E: drive and the folder wasn’t in the corresponding location on the E: drive, things weren’t talking nice. The reinstall and a copy over of the folder to the E: drive allowed the plugin to be registered and now it all works.
The move of the websites to new hosting is progressing. Sort of. I was able to test moving a copy of one of my sites to my laptop, stand alone versions of WordPress and after some issues and fanangeling with the database and access user and password I was able to get it to work. I think I know now how to make this work for the live copy and hope what it’s goes smoothly. It might. We’ll see. I want to make a couple more changes to that site before I decide to do that so I think I will test them on the laptop first so I know what to do when I move it for real.
The day job this week looks to be a bit intense. I’m not sure how things are going to go. I sort of anticipate some long days and being mentally spent so I don’t know how much will get done on the fun stuff this week. Hopefully I will get some stuff worked on. I’d like to get more done on Bernice and I’d like to get back to some of my 3ds Max stuff.