Week 1: New Beginnings

Howdy Folks,

It's been a long while since I've posted up, but it 's great to be back. I'm starting the year with a bang, with a new character project. From now till march I will be working on creating a Lumber Jack inspired by the style the video games of Last of Us and Uncharted 4.

This project has been based around my feedback from my mentor Del Walker. He mentioned that it would be in my best interest to create a character that is grounded in reality, demonstrating real world clothing and materials.

After mulling over the idea and detaching myself from the idea of working on Mario by Andrew Doma and my space marine project, I went ahead with it.

I started by creating a list of all the possible characters that would meet Del's criteria and of these the ski instructor, cameraman and lumberjack.

Afterwards, I began thinking off how I could make an aesthetically interesting character without creating Mr. Lumberjack. Then, I came across Philippe Dumas and Cory Piehowicz.

I felt like these two captured the rustic look that I wanted to go for without the element of familiarity or being too cliche.

After this I went to work on putting together a moodboard in word (my machine was in for an upgrade).

At this point I was getting really excited about my project, especially the prospect of creating narrative with this character, through clothing, props etc. I was beginning to create a character in my head I was loving the process.

Afterwards, I needed to do some research. If Last of Us and Uncharted 4 were the styles I was trying to emulate, I needed to understand what I was trying to achieve. Thus, I watched the Naughty Dog Zbrush Summit presentations and also observed the Uncharted 4 character art on Zbrush Central.

These characters were works of art, the attention to detail of each character is very impressive. Although I am not at this standard yet, I would love to aim for with this Lumberjack project.

After wards, I looked at the 'Re-imagined Ellie' by Ray Thuc Le. Again this was another brilliant piece of work and I love his artistic interpretation of the video game character. This is exactly what I would like to achieve with my project so I made sure I studied his process in his development log.

With all the research and ideas concreted, I began sculpting this character in Zbrush. I was a little rusty after not sculpting for a while, however it is good to be back and hopefully I will have captured a likeness by the end of the week. I just need to remember broad strokes and not get too bogged down by detail too soon.

Thanks for reading