It’s been a while since I made this one but I figured I’d post him here as well. So here goes:
Meet Mario Incandenza. A character I made after an amazing concept by Piotr Jabłoński simply called Boy. It’s a concept I found 9 years ago, when he posted it. I didn’t feel able then to bring it to live in a respectable manner. So I waited. Several years later I read a book called Infinte Jest by David Foster Wallace. There I found a boy with an oversized skull that was kind and humane and was trying to live a normal life despite his misfortune. It wasn’t something that happened on the spot, but after a while things clicked and I saw in Piotr Jabłoński’s concept that boy from Infinite jest. And now it was time to try and bring it to life in 3d.
After this decision, there’s not much to say. It’s how building a character in 3d usually is: some things go fast and you’re amazed at your progress, after a while things start to slump and you end up postponing your work again and again until you come back to it with another gasp of fresh air and energy. And eventually you get to a place where, even if it’s not perfect, you start being pleased by your work and it starts looking how you’ve envisioned it. That’s the thing for which you put in all those months of work. And when I got there I couldn’t stop but wonder how much work and thought can go into building a few images.
This was build like this over the course of almost a year, while also working on other different projects, both personal and work related. With a huge gap of 6 months in which I didn’t work on it at all. All those working hours spread over a period that’s so big make it seem like you’ve been living with the character for quite a while.
For this I wanted to give it even more of a personal touch. That’s what brought about the red hand which is supposed to look unfinished. That’s what I thought would be the version of a 3d character for a human that wasn’t as fortunate at birth as most of us were. I wanted that hand to be hidden at first, but then to hit you with everything it’s got. So that it speaks quite clearly how simultaneous can living a normal, fulfilling life and abnormal circumstances can be.
There’s also the text on the jacket which is one of the paragraphs from the book which made me love Mario Incandenza’s character in the first place. Which madee it feel much more real than a fictional character usually is. It’s a moment when his own disabilities help him overlook the abnormal conditions of other and threat them in the humane way that everyone deserves.
The last gimmick I used on him is that little used up print of a text on his T-shirt. Which is an excerpt that should be reminiscent of the post-ironic statements we usually find in Infinite Jest. It’s a small excerpt from an ironic post-modernist sort of statement-type-art by John Baldessari which is named: ‘Tips for artists that want to sell’. I took the first sentence from there and turned it into something more fitting for Mario: „Generally speaking, paintings with good looking characters sell more quickly than painting with ugly looking characters.” A statement’s whose multi-layered irony in this usage here should be quite clear: I’m not trying to sell anything.
To conclude, I think, so far, this is the piece of 3d artwork in which I invested more than I did in anything I’ve done so far in 3d. And I’m glad I did it.
Link to the original concept: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/mqPqv
And here’s the link to the original post on my artstation profile: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/YBoLwY
