Let’s start from the begining, if you check my Artstation profile I’ve worked several years creating an illustration portfolio with some 3D pieces, on October 2019, before pandemic, my wife and me attended to IluxCon 2019 at Reading, Pensylvania.
I had the honor to meet an amazing couple of sculptors, Colin and Kristine Poole, they were exhibiting some pieces of their collection. One night I had a small chat with Colin and he adviced me to try sculpture, he said: “Listen to the muse’s calling”; it took me 3 or 4 years to listen.
My first digital character sculpt was the “Crimson Ronin”, a videogame character which has it’s own blog entries if you want to check it out.
My favorite part was sculpting so I have the crazy idea of creating a portfolio to break into the collectible and miniatures industry.
This piece started as an anatomy study, it wasn’t meant to be a finished character so my main goal was to follow a tutorial by Marc Brunet titled “Nude figure Scultping Guide”.
I wanted to challenge myself by sculpting a complete female figure for the first time, not stylized or cartoony but semirealistic.
My mindest shifted direction as my wife suggested me to change from a generic female figure to a finished character. I thought it was a good idea because not only I could identify which were my strongest and weaker points, but at the end of the process I would have my first finished fanart ready to be 3d printed.
Photographic reference from Marc’s tutorial.
ZSpheres figurine
As I mentioned before, this was meant to be only an anatomy study of a posed figure, so I started (like Marc in the tutorial) using zspheres and basic rotations to find the pose and proportions.
After that I applied the unified skin to get a very basic base mesh as a starting point.
DISCLAIMER: there will be gaps in the process, unfortunately I don’t have some files anymore, I’m used to save lots of incremental stages and to free some disk space I had to erase some of them.
Anatomy and body tone
I mentioned before I worked on my illustration portfolio and for this I have studied a lot of anatomy and figure drawing, as a matter of fact I have worked as figure drawing teacher and fantasy illustrator, therefore the foundation I have is very strong, not perfect, but good enough to translate from 2D to a 3D human figure piece.
Lots of hours later I got to this point. I was satisfied with some anatomical forms but I felt the legs were bigger than the upper body.
At this stage I decided to create a comic character using the pose from the reference.
I considered to sculpt Poison Ivy or Catwoman but I wanted to explore a female character not from the mainstream, so I remembered one of the most sexy and strongest anti-heroines in the comic industry: Brian Pulido’s Lady Death, ¡Damn she’s hot!
With Lady Death in my mind I started to visualize a strong woman, with a body tone belonging to a female warrior, I didn’t want to give her a bodybuilding structure so I tried to show some muscle groups but not super exaggerated.
I resized the upper body to have better proportions, added big breasts 
and modeled a very basic scythe to give her more personality. My main goal was to start stablishing the general look of the character.
Head
This was the most challenging part of figure regarding to anatomy, I had never sculpted a female face before so I struggled a bit.
As a figure drawing teacher I know the proportions and main forms of the human head, the difficult thing with female faces, in my opinion, is that everything needs to be subtle but defined enough to have a solid structure. If you define a lot some forms you start to have a masculine face so it’s a game of adding and refining clay.
My first intention was to give this character a similar facial look to the actress Bryce Dallas Howard, so I gathered references.
By the way, I never intended to do a portrait of her, so I wasn’t very conecerned of getting the exact likeness of her face.
I knew that the head needed lots of polishing but I wasn’t very sure about the direction it was taking, so I forgot about beautiful Bryce and decided to mix facial features from different actresses and models.
This process wil continue in my next entry.
Thank you very much for getting this far, I will be posting how this piece has evolved. Please send me your comments and questions.
May zbrush be with you.