Medium is a fantastic experience, before I keep adding sculpts, decided it's time to start a sketchbook. Will start with a bit of a retrospective, and more or less start at the beginning and with any luck, keep at it for years. Here's a carousel I made a few months ago, to see the creations up to that point.
Two Year Anniversary Update (mostly sequential with annual highlights)
At this point, took a wildly different direction. Decided to clone some of the armor, was thinking about merging it and doing some cutaways. Something of a possible fork here. The lighting and tilt adjust show some new patterning possibilities, but is starting to look more like a statue or an object of some kind. Alternately, could merge it all, carve the wings (or remove entirely), and see if I can scale it down enough to use as a bracer, a pommel, or similar accessory.
Looking from the top, the figure (if any) definitely will be very thin, or require quite a bit of additional plating. I like the effect where the stamp overlayed at the top ridge (probably have to zoom to see it). Incidental, side effect, but something that I can see using on repeat to create scaled armor or as for trim somewhere
Most likely will continue back from here, likely trim the arms for a vest and start thinking about a pose. Anyhow, finding it to be a pretty versatile stamp, with nice dual tone metals and form characteristics. Probably will use this quite a bit when armoring figures
This stamp, in a couple of metal and emissive settings, was used for a fair amount of the octopus texturing. The hard metal didn't really go with the piece, although may use it for some environment objects. So anyhow, that was kind of a side journey. The octopus went through a variety of textural experiments of its own, some of which I kept and some which eventually got discarded. While interesting in their own right, they didn't really work well for this particular critter
Without the suction cups, the movement changes, and the camera angle, the underside is taking on kind of an abstract effect, with an interesting array of emerging textures
Still hammering away on this damned octopus, trying to get it to where I'm satisfied with it. Not sure if that will happen before I run out of memory on my machine, or not. I like the green better in VR, but maybe not as much in the photo. Will take a brush to them eventualy and see if I can get them to work in both mediums
Slow progress. Working out how I want to do the background imagery. Always interesting how much different the 2d and 3d appearance is, particularly with emissives and metals with very low roughness. In VR the stone feels very gemlike and transluscent, in 2d not so much. Better in large screen view, but so much more active when immense and in 3d. Blending is tricky for similar reasons. Settings in the top image have potential for something more like water. I expect the background to change quite a bit before this is done, mostly getting a feel for what surfaces work well together. Getting the lighting right is probably the next step, along with some higher contrast elements to separate the sculpt from the background a bit more. Will probably continue to work with this as long as the sculpt memory holds.