Big Art Drop. Baking Faces.

Sonic

School has been keeping me pretty busy, but not with what you might expect. This is a small selection of the stuff I've been doing.

Photography!

Spoiler:

Abstraction Assignment:



Motion Assignment:




Self Portrait Assignment:


The B&W version on this one is going in an art show in the next couple days

My final project for the class... still in the works: Photo Globes of my city!

3-D Design! (not computer based)

Spoiler:

3-D Transition Assignment (My first ever sculpture project):
This is just the last panel. I did 6 of them starting with a flat piece and then through the other 4 the face pushes further and further out of the plane, until you get this:






Unfortunately the other 5 were cracked at school.

I recreated one of my hiking boots using nothing but masking tape:




It fits.



Line, Plane, Volume Assignment using basswood:




My Final for that class is a revisiting of that face, but larger and more complicated. It's also very much in progress:

Other!

Spoiler:

This was from 2-D Design:


(it's a self portrait done with and ink pad and fingerprints.)

And an Illustrator portrait of one of my favorite people and also a lesson in the gradient mesh tool:

Comments and critiques are awesome especially since most of this is definitely not my usual bag.

ninjai

That basketball globe is awesome. <3 cool fotoz man.

melting_doll

Is the face sculpt an homage to Pink Floyd? Either way, awesome stuff! I love the shoe (:

Paradise

Wowzers, dude. I am seriously digging this stuff. Please post more in the not-too-distant future.

Sonic

melting_doll wrote: »

Is the face sculpt an homage to Pink Floyd?

Nope, it's not from anything in particular. But, I've heard Han Solo and Terminator 2 comments so far too.

And thanks guys!

Progress on the face:





Anyone have tips on sculpting eyes? I'm not looking forward to that...

DeeLock

Eyes are easy, you just have to be this good.

Nineteen Hundred

Eyes aren't too much of a hassle, you just have to sculpt each element individually. Hollow out the area between the brow ridge and the cheekbones as if he had no eyes at all, then add eyeballs and place the upper and lower eyelids. After that, it's just shaping them to your tastes. It doesn't look like you're going to add pupils and irises to your current piece, but for future reference they're mostly an optical illusion. If you look at that photo Dee posted, you'll see the irises are actually holes cut into the pupils, which are actually almost flat domes placed on top of the eye.

What's supporting that face, by the way? I'd imagine it'd be somewhat hard to sculpt and maintain shapes if it were hollow.

tapeslinger

Yeah, I would generally advise against sculpting a facial form hollow in what I'm guessing is water-based clay, but hopefully that foil will allow for some shrinkage of the clay. 1900 is right about the method-- I usually hollow out and refill the ocular cavity, building the upper and lower eyelids onto the volume of the eyeball. that mouth looks too long/high but that might just be the way the photo is displaying on my phone. If the distortion is intentional or my phone display, ignore me; if not, you'll need to shorten that-- grab a buddy to model and some calipers to compare on him/her. That's a really cool progression though! I like this a lot.

Sonic

Thanks guys. It's built on two lumps of balled-up tinfoil, one under most of the head and another smaller one under the chin. I'm doing that because this is Sculpey. I'm baking this fucker in my oven.

I did plan to add irises and pupils in the way of Deelock's reference, but I'm finding it hard to hollow out the pupil without warping the rest of the eye's shape. My tools are rather limited... all of it before the eyes has been by hand.

tapeslinger

I love sculpey but it is like art cheese, it really doesn't work well for those Davidesque eyeballs. I usually advise my clients who work in polymer clay to sculpt and bake eyeballs ahead of time and then install them before baking the rest. you might also want to 'leach' the clay by rolling it flat and pressing it between two sheets of computer paper under a dictionary overnight-- this wicks some of the oils out of the clay and makes it less limp. I'd still sculpt the eyes separate and install them before baking the rest. areas that are too thick will be prone to cracking so you want to keep thicknesses as uniform as possible to prevent warping and cracking when you bake it. I usually suggest baking it at a lower temperature for a longer period of time, this ensures thorough baking and is less likely to break later.

Sonic

Thanks for the baking tips, I had problems with cracking on a bunch of pieces from my last sculpey project, I'm guessing the baking is why. I've heard other people say to lower the temp and double the time. I'll do that this go-round.

I have devised my own solution for the eye-ball construction using a sharpie cap and a taco bell straw. First I rolled the balls and put them in the fridge for a couple minutes to get them firm. Then...




And more progress:

Molybdenum

that masking tape shoe is GLORIOUS.

might i inquire as to your process?

earthwormadam

Yeah I remember your photoskillz being great, so congratulations, they're still really great! I love those photo-globes! How do you make them, and how long did they take? They look seriously neat.

Also that shoe! Wow that shoe is so damn rad it hurts.

Sonic

Molybdenum wrote:

that masking tape shoe is GLORIOUS.

might i inquire as to your process?

Thanks and you may. To start I basically just laid out strip after strip after strip of masking tape down on a desk until I had a wide thick sheet. I peeled it up and added tape to the back side so it wasn't sticky anymore and it becomes sheet of tape-based material. I did this several times in varying thicknesses throughout the process. The thickest was for the sole, but it's not actually as thick as the sole of the real shoe. The sole on the tape-shoe is a hollow box. I put the shoes I was copying down on that tape sheet, making sure the shoe was flat and traced the sole and cut it out. Then I guesstimated the size of the part your foot actually sits on and cut that out. You can also put tape on the actual shoe and trace out the shapes of it's pieces on it, then when you peel it off you've got the actual shape of the piece, like for sides of the sole. Once that was built I moved on to the toe. To do that you just take smaller strips of tape and tape one end down and bend it back, sticky side out, to about the curve of the toe. Do this over and over again and until you have a basic shape outlined with tape. Then you just build on it. That's basically how I did the whole thing. It's not terribly hard, it just takes forever.

earthwormadam wrote: »

I love those photo-globes! How do you make them, and how long did they take? They look seriously neat.

Thanks, man. Basically you pick a place, set up a tripod and shoot enough overlapping photos to compile a full 360 degree panorama. I usually do a full spin with the camera level, then tilt it up and do another spin, then up again and another. Then put it back to level and tilt it down, do a spin, down again and one last spin. Then I move the tripod and take a few photos of the ground where I was standing. Anywhere from 60-80 photos for each. If I had a proper wide-angle lens it would take less than half that, but alas... Shooting only takes 15 or so minutes, but once they transferred to my computer it takes anywhere from 1 to 4 hours of work depending on how complex the fixes are that need to be made. I first open up the RAWs and make the necessary changes to one, then copy those changes across the board. Then I batch shrink them to 1000px wide and convert them to jpeg otherwise my computer would never be able to handle the merging process. Then I open them up in Photoshop's photomerge tool and with some luck it will stitch them together successfully. It usually takes a few tries to get it to finish. A couple were so finicky that I had to merge sections of them at a time and the stitch the merged sections together. Once you've got your panorama all stitched and blended, crop it down appropriately so that the right edge ends right where the left edge begins. Make the height of that image the same as the width, flip it upside down and slap on the polar coordinates filter and you've got the globe. Then there's a seam where the two ends meet that needs cleaning and the middle is usually a blurred mess that I fix with the photos I took of where I was standing.

Sonic

The face is officially baked and ready for finishing. I think I'm going to try copper paint with a patina effect.





Also the next globe:



I guess this thread's kinda random...

earthwormadam

i like i like

Sonic

Easing back into the swing of things.

A couple of scribbles.

One for my always-on-the-back-burner graphic novel
(based off of a real guy I met on my travels)


One of an old character:


And then this.

A long time ago, I did this:


I've revisited it:


uncropped:

Spoiler:

This one is going to get the colors, so I'd like some critiqueage if you don't mind.

tynic

I like it, not much to say about the construction except the perspective on her shoulder is bothering me a bit.

The image focal point seems to match the vanishing point above their heads/the hill, which keeps making me think something will appear there. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, even if you leave it empty you could play with the lighting and really make it seem pregnant with possibilities. Just something to be aware of I guess.

tapeslinger

I really love your style, and your character designs in particular! I want to know where that guy is going and where he's come from. I like the kids on the hill, but I feel like the sky needs more of something... can't really put my finger on it though. hmm.