Ute Lore

Last year, my friend Jesse Draper and I received a grant from Brigham Young University to create a concept art exhibit based on the legends of the Ute tribe of Native Americans. The Ute lived here in Provo, Utah before the pioneers founded our city. We co-exhibited with Japanese American artist Shu Yamamoto, who does hilarious and thought provoking reproductions of paintings in Western art history with all the characters replaced by cats (Shu's site).

A newspaper article about the show by Provo's Daily Universe can be found here:
Article


Below are some of the images I contributed to the show, along with some shots from the reception. You should really check out Jesse's work as well—he's an AMAZING painter and sculptor. His portfolio can be found at: http://jessedraper.daportfolio.com

With Jesse and Shu at the premiere

Thank you again to all who made the premier and reception a success! If you didn't get the chance to attend, the show will be open until April 24th at the Utah County Health and Justice Building in  Provo. For directions, click here. To see more upcoming shows from the Utah County Arts Council click here.

Figure Drawing Class quick sculpts

Check it out, another post! And it hasn't even been a geological epoch. It's like I'm a responsible blogger or something.

 It's been a while since I've gotten to do real figure drawing. Over the last couple of years I've been doing lots of figurative stuff from imagination and reference, but nothing beats a live model. This spring term I've been taking Michael Parker's advanced figure drawing at BYU; it's been a blast and a revelation; I'm learning a ton. 

Traditional figure drawing uses traditional media, usually a waxy conté crayon or a chalky NuPastel. However, Mike has encouraged us to experiment with different media and has been very supportive of doing some of my work digitally. Here are a couple of Zbrush sculpts done live in class these last few days:

60 Minute head sculpt from sphere. Lighting matched to model.

20 Minute hand sculpts (+10 minute zsphere armature).

Ceratosaurus

Howdy all, long time no post! I've been MIA largely due to my semester-long BFA final show scramble about which I will be posting soon. In the mean time, here's a dinosaur!

Ute Tribe Legends: Horned Snake

Created in ZBrush and Photoshop

First creature for the Ute Tribal Legends project! The Ute (former inhabitants of Provo) claim that a giant horned snake lives nearby in the mountains. He has poisonous breath and took five hunters to kill. I imagine him at 80 ft long, with a head as big as a Smart Car :)

Robot Silhouettes

Zbrush 4R6 and Photoshop CS5

Jackie Chan

David/ My first 3D Print!

The original ZBrush Model of David (his story can be found here).

The MakerBot: Replicator 2, the Harold b. Lee Library's new 3D Printer

David before the removal of his supports

Final cleanup!

The pouch and sling were too thin for this printer; they were reproduced,

but were fragile and came off with the supports. A 3D printer that prints 

with wax supports, like the one in BYU's Crabtree building, might have

more of a chance at preserving those kind of details.

Geeking

First Foray into CG Hair

This is my first attempt at CG hair, after watching a brief tutorial about fibermesh (ZBrush Hair) on the Pixologic website.  Hopefully President Eyring won't take offense . . . alright, time to go to bed; I'm teaching tomorrow.

Proof of Concept

Huzzah for my first ever full body full color zsculpt!  He's a Camptosaurus dispar, one of the major land herbivores of the late Jurassic period.  We're looking at incorparating some 3d into some of the exhibits at the BYU Museum of Paleontology, and this is kind of a proof of concept :)  Below is the Camptosaurus I used for reference, which is on display near the main entrance.

PS— Time lapse video!

A time-lapse video of the sculpt.  My apologies, I forgot to press record at the last part, so it kind of jumps from 3/4-done to all-done.  With regards to the music—  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFhGzwSN_aQ. Oh. yeah.

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 :)

Christmas Devotional Speedsculpt

 

Wacom Intuos 3 Tablet and Zbrush 4r4

Happy December everyone, it's officially Christmas! er, season!

The Christmas Devotional/ Mormon Tabernacle Choir was tonight and I thought it would be fun to sculpt one of the speakers :)  This speedsculpt is of President Henry B. Eyring, first counselor to the Prophet Thomas S. Monson.  Mayhaps I'll put his glasses on at some point :)

A full version of the Christmas devotional and concert can be found free and legal at:

Link

Enjoy!

Exploratory Fighter Ship Sculpt

 An exploratory sculpt for a short film I've been doing concept on (these guys).  I'll give you updates as I can, I'm pretty pumped for this one :)

(Posted with permission of the filmmakers).

Cabbage Creature

1/2 man, 1/2 lizard, 1/2 fish, 1/2 cabbage–  a creature so beastly, it defies the laws of fractions!  This one was kind of stream of consciousness lol :)

It's October, and I think I may have monsters on the brain . . . hold on to your poppin'-corns, this may not be the end ;)

Hammerhead alien sculpt

A quick zbrush sculpt from this afternoon :)

7-week Sketchdump!

Aloha ye denizens of the information superhighway! Whoa, I haven't heard anyone call the interwebs that since those non-sanctioned fieldtrips with Mrs. Frizzle . . . am I dating myself?  In any case, I had the incredible opportunity recently to take a gesture drawing course from one of my heroes, Ryan Woodward (plug!). While ostensibly a figure drawing class, the course was essentially a 2 month intensive in creativity.  Ryan pushed our brains to the limit, and we grew a lot.  I feel incredibly blessed to have participated.

Each week we had a sketchbook theme, which we were to incorporate into our work, inspired by life sketching.  Here are some selections from my sketchbooks:

Week 1: Romance

Week 2: John Hughes Film

Week 3: Extreme Sports Mothers

(PS- Hitler was from our readings that week.  Apparently he banned Mickey Mouse cartoons in Germany in 1935 . . . thus officially completing his turn to the dark side.)

Week 4: Socialite

Week 5: Monsters

Week 6: Star Wars Ponies

Week 7: Sci-fi

Mud

A couple of mudbox sculpts, George Washington and an alien.  No relation whatsoever ha . . . or is there . . . I'll leave that one up to the conspiracy theorists ;)

A turnaround of the Alien: