Day 284

So onto a new project. I have idea of things I want to do but for some reason I did not want to do them. Instead I flipped through Shiu Pei's blog to look for inspiration. I came across this Zephy character she made during art school. What drew me in wasn't the design (which is excellent) but how Shiu Pei colored and textured the character. It seemed like something challenging to emulate so I accepted the challenge and proceeded to emulate.

Zephy has big eyes so that's where I started. I made the eyelids and then created the eyeball and adapted them together. I spread outwards from there. Next I made the mouth, spread outwards again until I hit the eye orbit area and connected them together. Then I build up and backwards to create the rest of the head.

With the head done, I moved downward. It's pretty much just a tube that I expanded and rotated as needed to make the neck, torso, lower body and base. After that I made an arm with a simple hand and fingers. With half the body done, I mirrored everything over. Now the head looks fairly odd. This was because in the drawing, the head is at an angle instead of straight on. I'll fix this later.

I wanted to pose the model in the same manner as the drawing so I switched over to Mudbox. Before posing though, I adjusted the head to make it more feminine and less alien. Then I posed the head, arms and each individual finger according to Shiu Pei's drawing. The finger positioning is a nice touch. Finally I added some curves to the spine so the body is sitting along one plane.