Wordpress!

So the home page may look the same, but my friend Dani just installed Wordpress so that I can more easily update news in here! (Thanks Dani!!!). So now I have a bunch of news posts with zero comments. Looks a little sad I must say... heh. Anyhow, I look forward to updating this blog a little more regularly now that it is so easy. :) For those of you who have been posting comments in my guestbook, thank you so much... all of the feedback is very much appreciated! To Abhay in Mumbai, India... yes, I need to get back into production of some new tutorials! I just got the beta of 2009 so perhaps you'll see some new stuff from me this fall. -Alex

Gnomon Gallery closing party!

Hi all... so the Gnomon Gallery Rabbitholes show is having a closing party (open to the public) this Wednesday, September 17th at 7pm. Swing by and check out the work! The images are really stunning in person. www.gnomongallery.com

Guardian

Image made with Maya, Zbrush, Mental Ray. I started this as a head sculpt/sketch from a sphere in Zbrush, but then added the torso... then the lower limbs... then decided it needed a background... then some bugs.. then some smoke.Since I didn't start with a design, I just poked at it from time to time over the past couple months. So I guess the image evolved over time, but I'm happy with where it ended up. The final image is 4500x8000 to be printed at 30"x54".

Fume

Same guy as below... it was tough settling on an angle to work on him from. I'm still not even sure if this was the right choice, but time to walk away from it. I shot a bunch of photos of smoke specifically for this image that I comped in Photoshop... and now I am a big fan of smoke photos. They're purty.

Ember

So I recently started shooting friends/models with the initial intention of finding interesting poses/lighting to use as reference/inspiration for my 2D + 3D stuff. I've been taking photos and tweaking them in photoshop to create possible directions for a 3D image. In the process, however, I've found that I kinda like how some of them turned out on their own, without the need to become just 'reference'. I thought I'd post one of them in here just to share what I've been doing...

Study

Render test of the aforementioned sculpt that has since evolved a little in zbrush. I definitely need to do something more interesting with him than this... :/

Whisper

Happy New Year to all... Here's a quick photoshop study of a new zbrush sculpt. Still playing around with it so I'll probably have other images with this guy as he progresses.

Trin

Another new guy... this was made for fun, but also as 'homework' for a new class I'm teaching at Gnomon. It is a ten week class where every two weeks we make a new character or creature. The first assignment was to make a portrait or bust. Unfortunately I was only able to spend a couple days on him, but he's done for now. Time to move onto the next one...

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