I was messing with doing a quick figure relief. I did my usual and forgot to set it down after an hour and took it mostly to a finish. Pose is from the book “Study of Pose”, #802.
Finishing up a ballet figure in relief. It’s an arabesque pose and I separated the sculpt of the dress to make life easier.
This is what her face looks like from the side. It was originally much thinner but I scaled up the depth by request after it was finished. With enough depth, the awkward fish faces you expect from angles like these should start to disappear.
Another view of the depths on this piece. You can see that there’s quite a lot of shiftiness going on with the expected depth. Looking at the leg, you might think that it’s been pinched back at the pelvis but really it’s been pulled out lower down to provide more distinctive forms to the leg, especially where it protrudes from the dress. The angle of the hips was very important to the piece and I sculpted her without the dress to be sure I had it placed correctly. Limbs are able to carry their own unique depths because they are more difficult to compare in a relief. The relative change in depth between the front and back limbs is minor but hardly noticed because you’re focused on identifying the forms themselves. In most cases you end up with the bare minimum depth change to establish that one thing is in front of another. In this case, much of that distinction is made by the inward or outward twist of the hands and feet rather than by the receding of the limbs.
I recently finished up this portrait. I think sculpting directly in relief helps avoid a lot of the awkwardness of systematic hair styles in relief. All those curls were just not flattening quite as nicely as I’d hoped on my older portraits yet both Fanny and Dvorak are looking much better. For the beard I tried to emphasize the underlying planes as much as I could while breaking up the remaining space with a handful of different sized strokes based on the foreshortening. It’s still not ideal, partly because his beard hairs were so thick and rather spread out, but I think it turned out much better than I had hoped. I still had issues with the amount of detail I could capture without going up subdivisions endlessly but he’s still got more detail than most of my prior sculpts.
I had wanted to make a last pass over the torso to clean it up and give it some texture but somehow my Cintiq Hybrid’s power cable stopped working properly so that I couldn’t connect to my computer. Sadly, there is only one reseller that ships in the US and Wacom isn’t being very helpful since they aren’t responsible for their resellers. Also, that reseller is the Wacom store itself. Despite emailing them over a month ago, I still have no cable and no way to acquire one short of relocating to Europe so I’m stuck with a wonderful piece of hardware and no way to sculpt with it.
Simultaneously, my actual computer sprung a coolant leak, which I didn’t even know was possible. It drained straight into my graphics card which then spilled all over my foot when I took it out to dust it and find the problem.
In the meantime, I’m working my way through Scott Eaton’s Facial Anatomy and Portraiture class. I started a bit late and managed to get through the first half at a decent pace but my brain reached capacity and I’m now working my way through the 5th of 6 weeks. I’m taking excessive notes because I enjoy the lecture style for some reason and Scott asked me not to post them since the notes are too detailed and basically cover everything. When I’m finished with that I badly want to work on some 3D portrait studies, probably starting with some anatomical ones.
Anyway, I finished this and managed to get my laptop to cough up a render for it. I also managed to wrangle my side project together and order some 3D prints of Fanny and Dvorak in addition to a little metal book stand I’ve made for them to sit in. Renders for that and photos of the progress will hopefully arrive as soon as they’re finished up!
Impressive work! I hope you sort out your cintiq problems soon…