It’s been a busy week in general so I haven’t gotten as much time to work on projects as I would like. And I have this awesome new tool that I am still learning and getting used to and just want more time with it. It’s very frustrating. It’s like not being able to wear your shiny new roller skates in the shower. Oh come on, you know what I mean. There was that one cool thing you got as a kid and you wanted to wear it everywhere. Yeah, it’s that sort of thing.
And on to the artistic endeavors of the week.
The Pumpkin picture I’ve been working on got another layer of color for the background. The lovely wood texture was competing with the coolness of the stippling technique on the pumpkin. So I darkened and greyed out the wood a bit more and it’s starting to make the pumpkin pop. I will wait a day or two before I decide if it’s done or if it needs another layer. It’s getting close though. Sorry, no picture for the moment.
Saturday, I finally got to spend some time using my new Cintiq in Zbrush. I decided that a better way to really get better at Zbrush was to try creating things from reference. It keeps me from cheating and forces me to really learn how to make something specific in Zbrush. For me, if I make it from my imagination, while that’s a cool thing, I have room to decide that I meant for it to be whatever it turns out to be. This way, I mean for it to be, and if it’s not, then I have to fix it.
So I chose a photo of a crane that either myself or one of my parents took. I used it many years ago as reference for a pencil drawing I did as well as a pastel drawing. As I thought of sculpting this crane in Zbrush I thought of using zspheres to draw out the general shape instead of doing hat I usually do and starting from a sphere. So I tried the zspheres.
I did several things wrong with the zspheres starting with not getting myself properly aligned in the view port so that using symmetry was not possible. I know I could have rotated the entire object but at that point I had run out of enthusiasm for the technique. But I still want to make this crane. So back to the old technique. I’ll start with a sphere.
I put a big ol’ sphere on the screen and hit the edit button and made it a poly and got to work. The primary brush I used was the move brush. I pulled out the the tail and the neck, and the start of the legs. The polys were all starting to stretch badly. So I decided to try the 
Zremesher. The end of last week I had a chance to read a few reviews of the new release of Zbrush, 4R7 and they raved about the rework of the zremesher tool. Zremesher 2.0 is awesome. I so agree. I had all my polygons streched and ugly and I hit that button and they were all pretty again. Now I was able to stretch things out some more and it would
break.
This was looking good. I was really pleased, if a little shocked. I have struggled a bit to really get comfortable with Zbrush so to have it starting to look like what I intend is really something great for me. I thought about stopping at the point where the crane has no legs but decided I would go ahead and try to get the legs in for the poor bird before calling it good and going off and doing chores. They are a little skinny, but the bird does have skinny legs.
And that’s how I left it for a few days. I got back to it around Tuesday and started on the head. The shape wasn’t quite right so a little more move brush and that helped. I used it on the top and on the sides. I needed the top of the head to be a little flatter with a bit of a slope and the part of the face where the beak attaches needed to be puffed out a little. And the just under the chin area needed a little adjusting. And time to add the eyes. While you only see the one side in these pictures, I was using symmetry so both eyes got created. It took some work to get the ridge on the head above the eye just right. But I managed I think. For now it’s working. For this I used a combination of the standard brush for a bit and the clay build up brush, and of course the smoothing brush.
I think it’s starting to develop a little personality.
Obviously there is still a lot of work to do to complete the crane. But I think I’ve got a pretty good start.
I also started working on some pieces and ideas for this year’s Holiday card. I know, it’s nine months away. But really, if I start now I might get it sent out earlier than the 23rd of December this year. I might even get it done early enough to have it printed. I think that would be cool.
Even as busy as this week was, I was finally able to get back to the Mannequin for the TKD project. I got the hand object modeled and added some reference for height. I’ll be posting all about that soon.
And the big news for the week is that I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and create a business doing art. I filed for my LLC and had it approved this week. I will be setting up a site for it and even hope to add a gallery of some of the projects as well as other art to come. The name of the company is: SusanG Productions L.L.C.. I’ll provide more information once I get the website up and ready for visitors.
So that’s my week. As always, I’m hoping to get more things done or worked on this next week. I have a list of things that I need to get done soon and then there is the list of all those other things I want to make. So there is never a lack of things to work on, the challenge is deciding which to work on next.