A learning experience

       This is a cover for a recipe book my writing class is putting together, with the "pencil-fork" sculpted in Zbrush/Blender and then photographic elements incorporated in photoshop.  There are lots of easier ways to accomplish what I did than the path that I chose, but I've been dying to learn more Blender and ZBrush and it was a good opportunity to do just that :)  You can't tell in the picture, but the noodles are alphabet pasta, which I thought could be a fun way to emphasize the theme.

     Before this point I had reached a certain level of modeling competency in Maya, so it was a humbling experience to start from square one (polygon one?) in Blender. The result wasn't the prettiest, but I got some basics under my belt.  Then, bringing the pencil into Zbrush, it was a fun opportunity to learn about materials and radial symmetry, which I hadn't worked much with in that program before.  It was neat to be able to sculpt identical designs on the six sides of the pencil at once :)  The tines of the fork got irreparably mushed when I up-resed the mesh ("splinched" for you Harry Potter fans), so the final image includes more of my photo-reference fork than originally intended. The final product definitely shows that it was a learning experience, but that's what counts!  I'm psyched to take the new skills I learned and apply them to future creations :)