
Having sculpted this wee chap in Zbrush and painted him up a few weeks ago, I was damn keen to get him 3D printed. I uploaded him to i.materialise.com and purchased a print about a week ago and today he arrived on my doorstep.
There’s something satisfying about holding a tactile incarnation of a character you’ve designed in your hand. It taps into that childlike urge to hold and manipulate and examine things. It’s so much better than just seeing it on screen. It feels like the logical conclusion of the fascination that first inspired me to start drawing pictures of the toys I had when I was a kid. All I know for sure is that it puts a smile on my face.
Having been inspired by my visit to Wellington and the powers of Zbrush, it’s taken me a surprising amount of time to get something new done. This is a little character I’ve had in the pad for a while and I thought it would make a great project to stretch my Zbrush skills a bit more. The creation of this character required getting to grips with a lot of new facets of Zbrush, such as merging multiple subtools, posing and, the most daunting, hard surface modelling.
The sculpt was great fun to do, especially the head. However, having sculpted it from one sphere, I realised after having created other parts of the character that I could have achieved better results by creating separate pieces and merging them into the head. The creation of the gun was quite time-consuming, probably at least six hours, but it was gratifying to see it come out so well. I’m looking forward to seeing what other tech I can create using Zbrush.
The paint over took a lot longer than I expected. It really is a case of the work having to be done somewhere along the pipeline. There’s always the temptation to get the model rendered and into photoshop as soon as I can, probably because I feel more comfortable painting as opposed to sculpting at this stage. Really though, the process could have been sped up if I’d taken that extra bit of time sharpening up the model. You live and learn….
My girlfriend has declared pantry moths to be her mortal enemy. This picture is inspired by her efforts to destroy every last moth.


Picked me up some sweet brush pens the other day after seeing the work of this guy. Having inked over some previous sketches , I’ve found them to be a very controllable medium which allows you to create a variety of marks. Detailing is a little difficult at this stage, but they are great fun to use.
This started off as a quick update to make it ready for t-shirt printing, but now that it’s done I like it more than the original. If you’re interested in getting one of the t-shirts, I will be selling this as well as a few others at Supanova in Brisbane on November 9th. Me and a talented friend of mine by the name of Pete Yong with have a booth in Artist’s Alley where we will be selling various wares of an artistic nature, so please come down and say hello.

More Super-happy fun times at CDW in Wellington. First up, a future-trooper borrowing heavily from Aaron Beck’s work. For the real thing go here. Then there’s the knight’s head with some hand sculpted hair. I’m looking forward to rendering out and doing the paint over tomorrow.
Busy day today. First up was this knight with his hunting dogs drawn during the Greg Broadmore session. Next up was the Ben Mauro session creation which was intended to be a werewolf of sorts, but has since come to resemble some sort of pig-man. A smug looking one at that. Lastly was this heavy duty shocktrooper, done during the Aaron Beck stint. Might put some more time into him tomorrow.
I’m currently attending the Concept Design Workshop in Wellington. This one week workshop features top artists Greg Broadmore, Ben Mauro and Aaron Beck from Weta Workshops, along with special guest Robh Ruppel. In preparation for the workshop I started learning Zbrush last week and after today’s session with Ben Mauro I’m really excited about the possibilities this powerful application can help me realise. I’ve attached my initial efforts from last week, as well as today’s sculpt and paint over of what I’ve termed a pig-dog assassin. I’m looking forward to what inspirations and revelations tomorrow’s session will hold.