WH40K Sister of Battle Fanart

The story behind this project is funny. I was talking about this in my previous post.

I found an really cool artwork done by Johannes Helgeson, didn't know the character back then, it was just written WH40K Sister of Battle. I knew WH40K back from my childhood and after searching about the Sisters of Battle, I fell even more in love of the character. I always had a sweet spot for fanatic woman in armor. It also reminded me a bit of the characters from Requiem, a comic book with gothic vampire in armor. Same kind of color scheme.

And instead of starting to 3D model it, I've buy a few miniature and start painting them. But it was time to start this project and here it is.

The original artwork was just of the head with a bit of the shoulders and the torso. But I wanted to do a full character. The good thing was that Johannes seems to like those Sisters as he did a few other drawings with the complete armor. I did a big mix between his style and the original miniatures from Warhammer.

The first pose was inspired by one of the miniature. The second one also with some kind of jetpack. I had a little crush when I've discover those flying units in miniature. And since it was not too hard to create an extra jetpack, I decided to go for it.

And when I've done that second image, Johannes just released a new artwork he did with a new Sister of Battle jumping into action with arms around. I really liked the set up so I decided to go for it but was too lazy to change the head to match the original artwork.

The modeling was done in Zbrush, textures in Substance Painter. The rendering was done using Maverick Render and a bit of touch up in Affinity Photo.

So all this is kind of a mix of everything from inspirational artwork to miniature. I might try to 3D print these one day now that I have them in 3D but in order to do that I still have a big amount of work to make them "printable", like thicken the clothes, fix some holes, thicken the sword a bit.

Will see when I will be able to do that, but it's certainly something I will do in a near future.

And now that she is done, I might come back to some painting, it was good to be back at it.

Back to my Warhammer roots

 In my previous post I was talking about painting miniatures and an old hobby. Well it seems that I've been doing a full circle and realize that almost all my creative stuff can connect together and go back to this old hobby.

When I was a kid, my older brother was playing Dungeons and Dragons with some friends and I've discover the little figures you can use as your avatar. I was fascinated by them and I've start painting them. I really enjoyed this and I've spend countless hours painting armies.

What's funny is that painting those lead me to met some people doing live role playing and since I was good at painting, I've start doing make up and prosthetic for those live role play, doing some monsters and crazy stuff. This gave me the bug for special effects. And I've jump into computer special effects a few years later and it became my job. Then for my passion of Jumbos Machinder all those prosthetic stuff I learned younger became pretty useful to create molds and painting the repro I did. Combining also the modeling skills for the 3D print I've develop during the years. And last year I decided to focus more on character modeling and go back to do things I love. When looking for a new character to model, I came across an image of a Warhammer character and decided to do it, but when digging more infos about this character I've let myself take a huge detour into painting miniature again.

I've spend the last year in Cyprus with my family and the local toy shop I was going sometimes for my kids had some Warhammer figures. I've been lurking on them every time I was going there  But knowing that we where coming back to Belgium, I've never buy any. The day after we came back, I've completely let myself go and bought everything you need to start painting again. Lots of figures, tools, paints and build a little paint station at home.

At the end I haven't start doing the Warhammer character who gave me the bug again, I need to start it but I have a big pile of unpainted figures and I want to paint them. So I will have to try to split my free time between all this, 3D modeling and painting.

The ultimate goal would be the 3D print that character when it will be finish and of course paint it. So this would be some kind of creative mix of all the 35 last years of things I've do and learn.

Here's some pictures of that little detour I've done. Lots of experiments for the moment, trying various ways of painting. From fast techniques to slower one, from airbrush to paint brush. And somehow even the things I've learn when doing 3D textures are useful for this and vice versa.

That's the last one I've done, the eyes give him a bit of a weirdo look, I still have to improve on this, but I really enjoyed painting the body and all the details. And of course there's so many other things I want to explore now in the miniature painting, like the artificial light source, the fake metallic effect. As usual too many things to do and not enough time.... 

And the funny thing is that my brother actually kept my miniatures from more than 30 years ago and here's a pict of them. Cool thing is that even if I haven't paint for 30 years I have the impression that I've improve a lot because of all those other things I've done during those years.

I really need to go back on the 3D modeling, can't wait to have this project pushed further and I guess it will lead to various experiments and hope to learn more and more new stuff and mix them together. But I wanted to share this story and how I've realize that everything I did all those years kind of connect together and this certainly explains why I still feel like a kid today. 

All things at the same place

 Well, after years of not posting anything, I'm here again.

I have been very very busy on various things like work and kids and maybe a bit too much of video games, but I had a void to fill in terms of doing creative stuff.

The robot collection kept me busy and doing restorations was pretty fun and I wanted to do something a bit different, but at the end I'm pretty sure it will lead to doing toys or statues.

For the past few months I've been spending my free time to do stylized 3D characters. I'm a good fan of Shane Olson's work, a 3D artist who's mainly doing stylized characters and I decided to jump into his course and go back to do things I like. I'm doing my job because I like 3D characters and I've been doing tons of things that have push me into various directions always linked to my passion for 3D, but not to the basic things I truly like.

So with some free time this year it was about time to do it.

Here's four images of what I've been doing, probably more to come in the future. And I have to say that when I see ho cheap 3D printers have become, it's pretty tempting to get a nice one and start printing some of my models. I have a certain idea in mind, it will take a few weeks or maybe months as I'm a bit slow on things for the moment. But I hope that this idea will come to life. It's a character based on a drawing from a very talented artist, like all the things I've done this year, but I don't know why I had a real crush on that image and I have a clear idea of how and what it will be.

So here the very first image I did when joining the 3D course.

The original artwork is from Mike Henry. He did a really good job on the lighting of his character and I wanted to capture that too. The model is done in Zbrush, textures in Substance Painter, and for the rendr it was done with Marmoset Toolbag. Also some post process on the images with Affinity photo.

All this was also a good occasion for me to try to learn new tools and expand a bit my skills. I've spend so much years supervising people, that at some point I didn't had time to use the latest tools and there's always been some kind of frustration to not touch the images anymore, even if supervising is important, doing things is quite satisfying too.

The second project is some kind of cross over between a statue from Sideshow Collectibles and character design from Josh Black. I came across a really nice fight scene between Batman and Superman, really dynamic but more in a semi realistic comic book style. And I saw some great design of the Justice League made by Josh Black and I really liked the styles of his characters.

So this is the result of the mix of all that. That one also gave me the idea to maybe print it for me one day as it might look bloody cool if it's well painted.

Once again it was modeled in Zbrush, with textures in Substance Painter and the render was done in Marmoset Toolbag with some post process with Affinity photo.

And here's the third one. It is based on a design from Creature Box. There was some contest a few years ago in the course I'm doing and the theme was to pick a design from the guys at Creature Box. They are doing really amazing things and that specific contest was one of the things that I really liked about the course. The idea that there's some themes like that to push the students.

So I decided to pick one, even if that contest is long gone, but just for the fun of it and that character is pretty crazy. It was done for some game character for Ratchet and Clank

Here again, the usual trio of 3D software and Affinity to give the final grade and touch up.

It's kind of funny as I've been working at the office with Maya and Photoshop and I'm going another way for my personal stuff. This is mainly linked by the fact that those two are pretty expensive and also by the fact that I like to explore things and learn new software. I've also experiment a bit Blender for the render as it start to give nice results since a few versions.

Ok, now the last one I did was more for doing a female character. Somehow since I'm a kid I've almost never draw female characters. Always super heroes, monsters, spaceships all those nerdy boys stuff. I wanted to leave my comfort zone and try it and I came across a nice artwork from Sacha Tudvaseva. I decided to give it a try, it was slow as I was really not confident. But at the end, she looks pretty cool I think. For that one I did a first version of render with Marmoset Toolbag but last week, our beloved Shane Olson did a render using Maverick Render. It's a recent software and after downloading the trial version of it, I decided to go for it and test it properly with my Snake Girl project.

So here's the result of that experiment

So even if this blog has been dead for some years now, I wanted to do this post so everything is at the same place, and even if this is not toy related anymore, it's still about doing creative stuff during my freetime.

And speaking about old hobby, for the moment I've start painting miniature figures like I was doing 30 years ago. Might do a post about that when my experiment with modern painting techniques will be done. Somehow even if it's a different medium, I have the impression that all this is linked, but like I was saying it could be a nice topic for a future post that probably nobody will read :)