It didn't take long for me to find some concept art that I really loved. Enter "Sesslyth & Ezekiel," an unlikely pair of fantasy characters that I absolutely fell in love with. The artist, Michael Dashow, had a bunch of great concept pictures posted on his page. I chose this character for several reasons:
1.) The piece met the criterea set forth by Katon. There was a good deal of organic and hardsurface pieces for me to work with.
2.) Michael not only had done a full color conceptual piece, he also had several orthographic sheets already drawn. He created the piece as though it were to be used in production, so everything was already conceived from the get go. This made the image setup for modelling very easy.
3.) The art style. I naturally gravitate towards more stylized character design. I don't know why, but I've always loved it. The oddball cartoons like Ren & Stimpy and Rocko's Modern Life that I watched growing up may have something to do with it.
4.) It hadn't been modeled in 3D by another artist (at least not to my knowledge). That to me is very important. Too often I see countless "Star Wars" pieces, or other duplicate characters, in demo reels. The problem is that so many other artists have modeled storm troopers, Darth Vader, and X-Wing's, that unless your piece is absolutely phenomenal, it won't stand out. If you model a piece that an Art Director has seen before, he will always compare yours to the original, which in my opinion puts you in a disadvantage unless your piece totally kicks ass.
For the sake of time, I only worked on Sesslyth throughout the course of the workshop. I'm currently going back and doing Ezekiel.
 |
| Image by Michael Dashow. All rights reserved. This is the piece I used for my class. You can view more of Michael's work at his website: http://www.michaeldashow.com/ |
 |
| Here are the results of my first week of the class. This is the low-poly base mesh of Sesslyth, created in Autodesk Maya, imported into Z-Brush to begin sculpting the details. |
No comments:
Post a Comment