Tag: ZBrush

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Personal Art – Aphrodite in Stone, 2005

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Aphrodite in Stone, 2005

This is another rare ZBrush image for me. I had no idea what I was doing when I started it, and I’m not sure what I learned from it other than the fact I find ZBrush to be very confusing. I so wanted to learn how to make poseable 3D figures, but doing this piece hurt my tiny little brain. I did like the end result, however. I especially liked the hair and the sea shell she’s holding. That blue to yellow blend worked wonderfully. I think that was a texture map I painted in Corel Photopaint, so this one wasn’t entirely done in ZBrush, but 99.9% of it was.

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Personal Art – Dryads

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Dryads, 2004

This was a personal project, created using ZBrush. I love the results I can get out of ZBrush, but the learning curve is steep. Setting up the dryad characters involved learning how to sculpt them in ZBrush’s “intuitive” interface, then paint them, and then pose them. I found the program to be not so intuitive, and so I haven’t done much with it on a regular basis. I know it well enough to know what I should be able to do with it, but then when I use it, I spend the next few weeks beating out my brains on my desk as I try to figure out how to get the program to do what I want it to do.

By the way, this is one of the few 3D images I’ve done using just one program. I’ll say this for ZBrush. You don’t have to go to an outside program for post-work. You can pretty much do it all right there. Which may be why I find it so damned complicated. There’s too much packed into one program for me.

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Cover Art – Eternally Noir

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Eternally Noir, 2004

I’ve decided to redo the art gallery for this website in a fashion that will make life easier for me. Rather than try to set up a page with little thumbnails that link to other pages I have to create by hand, I’m simply going to post each piece of finished art I’ve got as a blog entry, under the delightful category of “Gallery.” I’ll change the link at the top menu to go straight to this category, so you can see every blog entry just by scrolling through.

And since I’m redoing things, I thought I’d start way, way back at the very beginning of my career as a paid freelance artist. The image above was created in 2004 and is one of the very first ebook covers I did for Logical-Lust Publications. The title was Eternally Noir and the brief I got just said to design something spooky and sexy. This image was inspired by a Michael Whelan book cover done for the Tanith Lee short story collection Red as Blood, a series of fairy tales done by the Sister Grimmer herself.

The image started in ZBrush, where I created the tree in the background. I created the bloody red sky in Bryce, and put all that behind a model in Poser. Then after the final render, I took everything into Corel Photopaint to work a little post-FX magic, enhancing the highlights and shadows and adding that lovely poisonous red glow to the apple. You know, if I recall correctly, I may have actually created that apple in Carrara and mapped it in UVMapper. Can’t recall that far back to be certain.

Anyway, this turned out to be the first of many covers I have done for Logical-Lust, and the first of many that I ended up using everything including the kitchen sink to produce.