Hi there! it’s me, Rob Zepeda.
It’s been a while since my last entry, my wife and me moved to a diferent home and there were lots of things to arrange, store in boxes, and rearrange etc.
In this third post I’ll be sharing more of the process for creating Lady Death, a fanart collectible statue
First of all I want to mention that I have great respect for the original design created by Brian Pulido, nevertheless with this fanart I want to give a different look to the character, I think of her more as a warrior and huntress than just as a femme fatal that wears a tiny bikini with long boots and gloves.
In my mind I imagine that she had to gather some leather, by killing animals and hellish creatures, and the metal ornaments could have been forged by Cremator, a master blacksmith that was vanished from Lucifer’s kingdom.
Disclaimer: To be honest I haven’t read a single Lady Death`s comic, my main approach to the lore was the 2004 animated film directed by Andy Orjuela. It may have some differences with the comic story, but it was the easiest way for me to have a better understanding of Lady Death’s universe.
Bra
For the black leather piece I used the classic approach of masking parts of the breasts and extracting with a thin thickness. Some Zremeshing, fixing polygons and polish by features were simple enough to get this piece.
The straps that conect the chest and neck were created with a single curve brush created by myself; at this point I didn’t think it would be useful to buy a pack with strap IMM curve brushes, also I wanted to understand how curve brushes are created.
From the beginning I wanted to avoid metal flourish ornaments, I want to give a bit of aggressive look to the clothes. I took inspiration from some Goth accesories and garments, I’ve tried to give a more organic look to the pieces and using some bone elements, not only looks cool,but it reinforces the supernatural nature of this character.
The little skull and bony hands are part of a skeleton Imm brush that I bought years ago. By the way, if you feel a little envy for those skeleton hands, trust me, you’re not the first.
Bikini
Again masking and extracting allowed me to create the cloth piece for the bikini, my trusty strap Imm curve brush helped me to add a sexy touch and also will connect the bikini with the boots.
Not wanting to leave just like that the bikini, I decided to create some ornaments to add a bit of salt to this piece.
As you probably know, for my first blog entry, this figure was posed from the beginning so I don’t have the possibility to sculpt with simmetry. I thought that it would be very useful to use a DAZ 3d model in T or A pose that allowed me to work with simmetry and later I would have only to adapt those pieces to the posed figure.
I opened DAZ studio brought a Genesis 8 female model and reshape her in order to have a similar body type of that in my zbrush posed sculpture. I rendered a front and a back view that allowed me to make some paintover to stablish the design of this ornamental pieces.
In this point I want to mention that I think is very important not to forget that as 2d or 3d artists we need to give a cohesive look to the piece, designing and experimenting is more time consuming that just directly painting or sculpting, but at the end of the day the time you invest in preliminary sketches will help you to reinforce the general message and look of the whole piece.
After completing a very simple sketch of the ornaments I returned to Zbrush to sculpt them. For the organic stuff like the skull in the center and the lateral bony fingerish pieces, the good old Move, ClayBuildup and Trim brushes were my best friends at this task.
For the hard surface pieces I decided to sculpt them only as sketches in zbrush, later I would import them as OBJ in Blender for modeling with better edges and topology.
Hardsurface sculpting/modeling in Zbrush is something I don’t understand very much, to be honest I haven’t immersed myself in Zmodeler or other tools that other artists use to stay in Zbrush, which is super useful. I will definitely study more about the hard surface workflow in order to have a more efficient sculpting methodology.
I decided to eliminate the diamond lateral pieces since I didn’t like how they looked. Instead I used again a spike Imm brush, it looks cool and it gives consistency to the shape language along the different garments.
By the way, adapting the symmetrical pieces I modeled in Blender to the posed figure, was a bit more complicated than I expected in Zbrush.
Gloves
Masking, extracting, zremeshing and tweaking geometry helped me to get the gloves pieces.
I searched for some references at Pinterest to have a better understanding of folds and wrinkles, for the bra and bikini I didn’t worry about that but for the gloves I had to trust on the images I found and my observational skills.
Sculpting or drawing clothes is on of the most complex tasks because you have to understand the physics and how some materials behave when the body takes a specific pose.
If you are having difficulties with folds, wrinkles and how clothes behave, I really advice you to look for tutorials, Marc Brunet and Glenn Vilpu have amazing information regarding to the clothed figure.
The metal ring at the top of the gloves was done in Blender because I wanted to have sharp edges and I couldn’t get those inside Zbrush.
I have understood that my lack of knowledge with hardsurface modeling with Zmodeler and other tools is interrupting my workflow, I will definitely study and practice this subject.
Again I decided to create an Imm curve brush in order to add the metal diamonds around the ring, for the little skulls I used an Imm brush with lots of skeleton pieces.
Some details were added to the gloves, like a seam at the inner part of the arms with some stitches, once again I bought an Imm curve brush with stitches to save some time.
In order to add some flavor I attached some organic spikes that protude from the gloves, the idea is that those cloth pieces are made from the skin of a creature like a small dragon or some kind of an abyssal reptile, that explains the iguanas pictures in my mood board.
Thanks for reading and joining me in the adventure of sculpting my first collectible figure.
In my next entry I will continue to show you some of the process for the boots, the cape and texturing all the garments.
May Zbrush be with you.