Hi there! It’s me, Rob Zepeda.
In this second post I’ll be sharing more steps in the process of creating a Fanart collectible statue with Lady Death as protagonist.
Hair
With the head merged to the body I started to sculpt some general shapes to see the flow of the hair. Before doing that, I took a screen capture from the front view of the character and threw some lines to explore the composition. I know it would be better to have other views of the figure but at that point I mostly wanted to explore the hair and other elements like cape and schyte.
I’m totally new at sculpting a whole figure, therefore I didn’t have the slightest idea of how to sculpt hair. To learn a bit of this subject I had to watch two or three YouTube tutorials for hair sculpting. Sorry for not remembering the names of the videos; both of them show the sculpting process for stylized hair, the first author is Dan Eder and the other is Danny Mac, even though my character is not stylized (cartoony) this videos gave me a very solid starting point.
I divided the hair in 5 areas in order to have better control, as I learnt with the tutorials, it’s super important to first have the main masses of hair and check if the flow and general forms are visualy pleasing.
After purchasing some hair curve brushes and lots of hours applying hair strands I got a hair style I found good enough and reflected the dynamism and flow I was looking for. More hours and hours of polishing waited me but I will talk about that later.
Anatomy rework
At this stage I wanted to rework some areas of the body that needed more polishing or adjustments.
The first thing I changed was the neck angle, in my first figure the neck and head were pushed forward, therefore it looked like she was humping. For this reason I tilted upwards the head, giving her a prouder and more imposing appearance. Also the chest looked very wide in comparison to the head.
Hands
Time to give some love to the hands. I wanted to detail and polish the anatomy of both hands and fingers but I faced a problem with the left hand (our left), as this element is in direct contact to the hip area I wasnt’ able to carve the roundness of the fingers and the palm.
I decided that the better approach would be to separate (cut) the hands and arms in order to have more control and freedom to work on them.
Another reason for making the separation was that; at the end of the day both arms are going to be printed separately, this character uses very long gloves that reach the middle of the biceps, so I took advantage and made both cuts.
After cutting the arms I started to refine both hands, again this was a bit challenging for this is my first time sculpting a female, fortunately I took my old notes on hand anatomy and did my best effort.
I think that one of the most difficult things of sculpting femenine hands is, as I mentioned before, to find the middle ground between enough information to give them a semirealistic look but not too much information that it starts looking masculine or rough.
I didn’t want to use wrinkles or skin alphas to detail them for two reasons: 1- I wanted to face the challenge of doing this by hand with a couple of brushes, and 2-I’m not shure it will be trully benefitial to have the most tiny little wrinkles and pores, my plan is to print this character in a 1/6 th scale, therefore it’s very likely that such subtle details aren’t going to be noticeable on the printed surface.
My 3d printer is a brand new Phrozen Mini 8ks, maybe I’ll print a test of this hands with more skin details and look how does it look.
Sculpting, painting and other artistic adventures aren’t lineal paths, it’s necessary to go back and forth in order to refine and adjust parts of the piece.
The first thing I wanted to modify were the breasts, I know that Lady Death has big ones but it’s not my intention to give her an exagerated look with titanic boob implants, my goal is to give her a sexy but natural appearance. By the way, I had a hell of a struggle defining the separation of both breasts, the contact area looked welded and carving the middle line with the damStandard brush gave a fake appearance.
Important Disclaimer: The position of both breast doesn’t have a natural fall acording to the weight, the reason for this is that I’m considering a bra that is pushing them a bit up and to the center.
Another modification was done on the face, I compressed a bit the side planes of the face, the result is a sharper (triangular) jaw line. To be honest, at this point I’m not super happy with this new look, writing this blog entries and revisiting my process allowed me to value more the previous version of the face. I think I’ll return to this head, it looks stronger and more imposing.
Some tweaks were made to the butts, I gave more definition and extended a bit the butt crack.
I don’t know why but it was a bit complicated for me to get the right look to this area, I explained before how also I struggled a bit with the breasts; I felt that I was only carving a straight line in the middle of the butt instead of having two semispherical shapes having contact right in the center.
I definitely need to sculpt more boobs and butts, a sacrifice my wife will have to understand 
Finally I smoothed a bit all muscles and reshaped the torso. Looking at the full body I felt the body tone belonged more to a female bodybuilder, it was too strong and muscular.
Hair Polish
At this point I was ready to polish the hair so basicaly I did three types of operations: Move and reshape hair strands, subdividing to have a smoother look and detailing some lines in minor areas.
Tip: A great brush for hair detailing is Orb Crack from the package Orb stylized effects. These are meant for enviromental detailing but they can be super useful for organic forms also, best thing is they are free to download.
To be honest I’m not sure that my methodology was the right for this figure, I mean, maybe it would be faster to give more resolution and detail the main shapes I started with, instead of adding brush strokes with a curve brush for each of the hair strands.
I’m not sure how difficult this piece will be to print (the hair), maybe I’ll cry tears of blood, but the only way to learn is to challenge ourselves.
Thanks again if you got this far reading this post.
In our next chapter I’ll be showing and explaining the development for the clothes.
May zbrush be with you.