Change of plans

     I know it's bad but this is gonna be another one of those update posts where I recap the last week or so. As mentioned before I had planned to enter the armed and dangerous comp ending 10th April, which required me to submit a fully sculpted and painted piece of work. Having only used Mudbox once before my handling of this task was pretty slow, and I had no experience in creating a sculpt that wasnt still in unpainted form. Therefore as the deadline grew closer I grew more apprehensive about getting this task done in time, sure enough the deadline came and went without me submitting. Whilst I definately want to get round to completing this, (digital sculpting is something that I want to be able to do with skill), I decided that if I was to enter comps with deadlines I may be better off trying out those based on 2D drawing. Futhermore digital painting was something I really wanted to get to grips with in my first year, and as yet it is not something I feel I have spent any real time focusing on. Therefore I am now a member of cghub.com where I can join their competitions, as well as posting my work.

My character

     I have now come up with a rough design for the character I will be creating for the "armed and dangerous" competition. I knew I wanted a large Samoan character to fit with my tattoo design and so started out with a very basic sketch indicating the form and posture.

     From here I began to further the design, adding features such as armour. I knew a large part of my character would have a strong tribal theme so for the armour I tried to make it more mechanical, so as to contrast slightly with the rest of the character.

     I liked the idea of a more permanent armour that was fixed to the character's body, hence the metal plates are bolted to his skin. I was inspired slightly by the characters from the film series "Predator" where you see a charater that initally comes across as primal and somewhat primitive, but have at the same time been equippied with futuristic sci fi armour and weaponry. Whilst I would not consider my character's armour to be overly futuristic I still feel that it holds certain familiarities.

     With a design in place I will now begin to plan and create this character in mudbox.

Armed and Dangerous

     I am currently brainstorming for ideas of an "armed and dangerous" character. The competion rules specified that this could be taken literally ie. a strong warrior character, or this could be implied in a more humourous manner, eg. doctor with a large syringe.
     Recently I have had an interest in the type of heritage tattoos used by Samoan and Maori cultures. I decided to start off using this as a source of inspiration for a character. Deciding that one of his arms would be covered by this type of tattoo I decided to design one for myself.
                         These are the reference images I found to give me an idea for the kinds of patterns I should use

   

     This is the design that I then came up with:





      I will now be focusing on creating a character which which I can incorperate this tattoo design