Making The Dream
This is not a tutorial
I’ve been a little rusty with Blender lately. I wanted to find a good way to jump back in, so I’m doing a painting study by creating a little scene. I found this painting where I loved the lighting - A Eunuch’s Dream. I mainly wanted to recreate those smoke figures in the light, but I’m not interested in a one-to-one recreation. I realized there is no way I can finish this in a few hours, so I focused mainly on one area that was my favorite- the baby with a knife!
If you’ve been using Blender consistently for a while now, a lot of this might seem obvious, but for people looking to get in or also need to resharpen their skills I hope this can be a good motivator! I also want to get better at explaining my process to others because sometimes you just do something and don’t really think about how or why.
I’m still not the best at memorizing shader steps for myself, so I used a mixture of tutorials I was following to get something new out of it. I mainly followed these two:
and
Together, I began to form something kind of interesting. Maybe?
For the body, I normally create characters in Nomad sculpt and import to Bender, but I wanted to just stick to Blender for this. So I messed around with a bunch of UV spheres and joined them together. The knife was a cylinder I just extended and stretched.
I tried my best to get the coloring similar but also this is so not serious.
Then I added a grease pencil > Object Line Art to make the glowing outline the character has. I also drew a little blood on the knife, which looks silly as hell, but whatever. Then I added a point light to make that little shine on the tip, which I’m still working on.
I really love compositing in Blender so I just moved on to that. I added glare and noise to make those elements stand out even more. Then I added a very small amount of chromatic aberration!
Um, I haven’t actually finished yet, hehe. That’s what I got for now, but I’m going to keep working on it! I hope you enjoyed my non-tutorial, and you feel emboldened to work on something this week!
Things I Animated Recently
I got a lil sick again last week, so I made what I was feeling. Hopefully it’s clearing out, but yeah there’s something out there right now.
Things Other People Animated
Gabby captured voice snippets of highschool protesters and animated them, which I loved.
Acho Studio stop-mo animating Bad Bunny’s Concho the frog.
This witch by Leah Putnam is really cool.
Ashsuh made a grease pencil rig tutorial, if you would like to follow an actual tutorial now!!
Stuff Happening
Sadly not in LA but PDX - Black Anime, a group exhibition. Featured artists include:
Julian Adon Alexander, Obi Agwam, Thierno Bam, Jeron Braxton, Z Cher-Aime, Jordan Coelho, Chris Montell Dennis, Frank Dorrey, Lauryn Levette, Brice Maleo, Chibu Okere, OSEANWORLD, Podge, Rixy, and David Torres II.
Hellavision announces their next theme: Cuntavision 2!!!
Hope you’re getting ideas going from the premise alone.
Popcorn Picks <3
Sniff of the Week: strange remote in the grass??
Loving: new alien friends I made when I licked the remote!
Unforgivable: their probes they poke me with :(
See ya next time!