Two great artists that I work with are graciously offering up their time and their knowledge to help some of the rest of us become better artist.  Mike Defeo is coaching some of us modelers who want to do a sculpture, then Danny Williams is going to help us transfer that maquette into the digital realm and clean it up and make it workable.

The first step in sculpting anything, of course, is coming up with an idea to sculpt.  Sounds simple doesn't it?  Well, I chose to come up with my own design instead of sculpting another artist idea.  So that simple plan is taking a bit of time.  I'm narrowing in on what I want to sculpt though.  Here is the rough sketch of what I want to do.

Its a little Spaceman Spiff inspired action shot.  If you can't tell, a evil tentacled alien has our would be hero on the ropes, taunting him by holding his weapon just out of reach.

Now that I have the basic characters, placement, and pose laid out, I need to narrow in on a final design for both characters.  Here is the design I think I'll go with for the space adventurer.

And here is pretty much what the alien land-dwelling octopus will look like.

Now I have to do a final design with all the elements pulled together in their final poses.  Then I can begin work on planning out the armature for the sculpt.  I'll try my best to document the entire process.