Pencil, Paper, a Ruler… a little knowledge of perspective and basic timing and voila!

I'm curious how many of you see a cube rotating counterclockwise, and how many are seeing a strange sort of 3D trapezoid rotating clockwise?

This time in a digital painting.  I'm trying to improve my eye for color, no pun intended.  This painting was from a reference image where I tried my best to match up the colors without any sort of color sampling or other computer trickery.  I feel pretty good about it, I think I came close in my color choices. 

So now that I've gotten into a more sculptural program, Zbrush, I'm finding that I want to do more realistic sculpts.  I've quickly discovered though that I've spent too much time over in cartoon land and most of that knowledge of anatomy that I learned years ago has escaped from my brain and is running amuck somewhere.  So I'm going to start the process of relearning anatomy and hopefully jogging my memory.  Tonight I started to rough out a skull in Zbrush.  I started from a polySphere though, which is one solid surface, and of course the skull and the jaw bone are separate pieces and the skull has a "hole" in it, or more like a bridge on it, namely the zygomatic arch (ha, I still remembered that).  So, now I want to go in and rebuild my model so I can include these features properly.  I'm going to attempt to rebuild it entirely in Zbrush to force myself to learn what the program is capable of doing.  I'll update the post and let you know the results soon.  Here is the rough skull so far.

Click the image for the larger version.

Well, I have a long, long way to go yet.  I can see I need to learn about the different brush settings and alphas and such in order to get a better result on the wrinkles, hair, etc.  I did, however, figure out how to make use of the subTools by putting these two surfaces together, the eye and the surrounding facial forms.

I tried to render out my Mad Scientist design to get a sense of it as 3d forms.  He help up pretty well from what I can see, there are two areas I'm not sure of yet, being the bags under his eyes and cheek volume.  If you click on the image you can tell each side of the face doesn't really relate for those two areas.  I'm sure I'll sculpt him or model him soon though so then I'll be forced to make a decision on what the depth of those features should be.

I'm posting a small picture of it to see if he is still easily readable with all the shading, to see it larger click on the image.

Another Zsketch today.  I tried using the primitives this time, a cylinder to start with. Then used a masking technique along with the Layer brush to help build up the well defined forms easily and all at the same level.  I also used flatten and pinch to help define the angles and shapes better.  He's still lumpy, but I just ran out of patience on tweaking out the details.  I kind of like the lumpy sculpey look he has right now though.

***UPDATE***

Tiki-Topo 

I successfully retopologized the Tiki head tonight.  It wasn't as much as a pain as I was expecting.  I had hear that the retopology features in Zbrush were difficult to use but I think it depends on your approach.  I could see what the topology should be with this guy pretty easy so maybe that helped too.  If you have to do a lot of editing to your new topology while you were creating it in Zbrush I can see how it could become a frustrating experience.  If thats the case then it could be easier to start by drawing the edgeloops on the surface first as a texture perhaps.  I'll have to try that in the future.  Anyway, this does mark one more step in my quest to learn Zbrush.

So I'm finally taking the plunge and am learning Zbrush.  Zbrush is a program that aims to mimic the feel of sculpting clay in the digital realm.  The program is quite unique in the 3D world, and it's interface takes some getting used to.  I'm watching a tutorial dvd to help me out.  Introduction to Zbrush 3 from The Gnomon Workshop.  So far I'm about a quarter of the way through it and am finding it very helpful and informative.  While I was watching it I was putting the information to use on a sculpt and this is what I came up with.

For this guy I only used 4 brushes.  Standard, Move, Pinch and for fun I tried out the Slash brush and gave him that scar over his eye.  So I could get pretty far with fairly little.  I'm curious to find out what the other brushes will allow me to do.

Anybody want to color this one?  She really is crying out for color, but I'm kinda losing interest in it myself.  E-mail me if you are interested at "contact @ AdamMcMahon.com" (minus the spaces) if you are interested and I'll send you the clean photoshop file.