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I’ve started a blog on artstation in an effort to clear some of the cobwebs in my creativity.
Here’s a link to it… https://weirdy.art/blog
I’ll do my best to duplicate the blog in this thread since a good chunk of my work is ZBrush. Apologies in advance for formatting errors and edits. I haven’t posted on ZBrush Central in years so it’s all kind of new to me (again).
Here’s blog #1 ART DUMP / DIGITAL APOCALYPSE - John K stuff
I’ve been feeling a bit “stuck” lately so I decided to take a big dump on the internet…
I plan on going through my hard drives one by one, find things with some sort of value, posting them and then deleting the million iterations and files that go with it. Stuff that I invested some time and energy in but will never be finished or client projects that have run their course. Find a few things I liked about it and save out a record to post here. Say a few words over it and then cremating the project.
Beck has a lyric that goes “loose ends, tyin’ a noose in the back of my mind.” Hopefully going through the ritual of digging these pieces up and acknowledging their “death” will help tear away some of those loose ends. Knowing that it’s ashes are out there somewhere should make it a lot easier to hit DELETE on these. At the very least it should clear up some hard drive space.
In this post I hope to just dump stuff, relatively unfiltered, out in to the world as one would the ashes of a loved one…!
First up for the bonfire, John K. stuff !
I moved to LA because I wanted to work with the artists at Spumco, creators of Ren and Stimpy. I did manage to work in the studio for about a month before they lost a big client and cut most of the staff. I was pretty devastated having given up a good life and swanky pad in Salt Lake City to move to a tiny apartment in Los Angeles. I moved on but always had it in the back of my mind to work with him at some point.
Years later I finally did get the chance to work with John directly on a project, a video for Miley Cyrus’ Bangers tour.
John had seen some of my sculptures on facebook and told me he liked them. I started working with him on a He-Hog toy and also did a few pitch/practice pieces using his characters. I’ll post the pitch/practice pieces at the bottom since I never really collaborated with him on them.
He-Hog was going to be a digital toy that you could fling around and break apart in a game engine.
For Miley Cyrus’ BANGERZ tour he did a backdrop video to be played during the performance. My job was to make a 3D Miley doll that would be used in a few shots.
The task was to take all of these and distill them into ONE sculpture. I nearly went crazy in the process. They are all Miley Cyrus, but there’s really at least 5 different concepts in there…
John K paint over.
The biggest stumbling block aside from getting the likeness distilled down was the concept of TOY. Is she a doll? A Jack-In-The-Box? Is she a marionette? A puppet? What kind of puppet?
The concept FINALLY got a fairly solid place when I remembered these “push puppets” from when I was a kid. The parts are held together with elastic string. When you push the button on the bottom they lose tension and get all floppy. The bonus was that it would probably be easy to rig and animate since all the parts are solid and it wouldn’t be necessary to paint weights.
There were 3 different heads and 3 different bodies. This is the combination I liked the best. He paid me for my time and we parted ways. I learned a lot from the experience but was a bit bummed she didn’t get used in the final project. Ah, well. That’s the biz.
Practice / Pitch pieces - John had talked to me about doing more online / game engine stuff. Digital toys, kind of like the Walk-Em’s that Spumco had done in the past. With these pieces I was trying to get his style down and/or suggesting concepts for toys.
