Studies of figures and imaginary forms

These were rendered using the "light from the eye" approach in which the observed lighting is not represented - instead the light is imagined to project exactly from the eye of the viewer.  The observed light and the capacity to "feel" the form in space with the eye are used to understand the form, but the form is modelled using the system - which is inherently spatial and sculptural - rather than visual.  I really like to work this way, both in the case of scattered lighting or shiny surfaces (such as shiny bronze sculpture) and because it forces one to think in terms of planes and helps to avoid a more passive copying of visual appearance.

The men pulling ropes are studies for a painting I am composing, thinking about what poses certain figures can be in, getting to know the types of things people do in this action, investigating their anatomy.

The other image is an imaginary form, loosely based on some photographs of ink being dropped into water.  Of course, in this case, there was no light to observe in the first place, since it was imaginary, so an intuitive system for applying light and shade consistently is really helpful.


A sculpture's journey in and out of the digital world

While in Florence last year, I did this portrait study in clay:

 

 I was not able to keep the model or cast it at the time.  So I scanned it digitally using the 123D Catch app on my iPad, opened the resulting file on my computer when I got back to Australia. This is a screen capture from Meshmixer of the scanned model:  

 

And a textured 3D model uploaded to sketchfab (that means that the surface colours captured by the photos has been "painted" onto the surface of the digital mesh (you will see more of this type of thing in the classical sculpture captures earlier in my blog) - click to load so you can rotate, zoom etc:

123D Catch scan of a clay life size portrait study of a model from life in Florence, Italy. If you don't know how this works, basically it is an app that lets you take a series of photos of an object from all around and the server crunches the data into a single model with the colours from the photos applied.


The file was rough but good enough to work on in Zbrush and clean up a bit - here is the model cleaned up, a new base added and uploaded to Sketchfab - click to rotate, zoom etc:

123D Catch scan of a clay life size portrait study of a model I did from life in Florence, Italy. If you don't know how this works, basically it is an app that lets you take a series of photos of an object from all around and the server crunches the data into a single model with the colours from the photos applied.

 

I then printed the model using my small Up Mini 3D printer.  The small model was printed in one piece, while the large one was printed in 8 pieces.  The safety glasses are included for scale:



Great Sketchfab page of 3D models of Greco Roman Sculpture and Architecture

Use Sketchfab to publish, share and embed interactive 3D files. Discover and download thousands of 3D models from games, cultural heritage, architecture, design and more.

Use Sketchfab to publish, share and embed interactive 3D files. Discover and download thousands of 3D models from games, cultural heritage, architecture, design and more.

Use Sketchfab to publish, share and embed interactive 3D files. Discover and download thousands of 3D models from games, cultural heritage, architecture, design and more.

Use Sketchfab to publish, share and embed interactive 3D files. Discover and download thousands of 3D models from games, cultural heritage, architecture, design and more.

Fascinating comments by Dali on Classicism versus Post-War art

These words from Dali's autobiography "The Secret Life of Salvador Dali" were recently sent to me by a friend following a conversation we had about classicism and integration in art - I had to share.

 

"We were consumed over reproductions of Raphael. There one could find everything - everything that we surrealists have invented constituted in Raphael only a tiny fragment of his latent but conscious content of unsuspected, hidden and manifest things. But all this was so complete, so synthetic, so "one", that for this very reason he eludes our contemporaries. The analytical and mechanical short-sightedness of the Post-War period had in fact specialized in the thousand parts of which all "classic work" is composed, making of each part analyzed an end in itself which was erected as a banner to the exclusion of all the rest, and which was blasted forth like a cannon-shot.

War had transformed men into savages. Their sensibility had become degraded. One could see only things that were terribly enlarged and unbalanced. After a long diet of nitroglycerine, everything that did not explode went unperceived. The metaphysical melancholy inherent in perspective could be understood only in the pamphleteering schemata of Chirico, when in reality this same sentiment was present, among a thousand other things, in Perugino, Raphael or Piero della Francesca. And in these painters, among a thousand other things, there were also to be found the problems of composition raised by Cubism, etc., etc.; and from the point of view of sentiment - the sense of death, the sense of the libido materialized in each coloured fragment, the sense of the instantaneity of the moral "commonplace" - what could one invent that Vermeer of Delft had not already lived with an optical hyper-lucidity exceeding in objective poetry, in felt originality, the gigantic and metaphorical labour of all the poets combined! To be classic meant that there must be so much of "everything", and of everything so perfectly in place and hierarchically organized, that the infinite parts of the work would be all the less visible. Classicism thus meant integration, synthesis, cosmogony, faith, instead of fragmentation, experimentation, scepticism."

 

 

 

Mock up of a timber sculpture I want to make in Qld Red Cedar

Below is a cropped version (limbs and head removed) of a figure I made in zbrush.

I applied a timber grain texture of Queensland Red Cedar to the digital model to get an idea what it would look like if it was carved in this timber.

Click to load and rotate/zoom/pan etc.  

Click the little eye button and then "help" for more details about how to navigate the 3d model.

Use Sketchfab to publish, share and embed interactive 3D files. Discover and download thousands of 3D models from games, cultural heritage, architecture, design and more.


Free Art Learning Resources: Head Construction including 3D skull models

One of the free resources I have added to this website recently includes some of the course notes from the Fundamentals of Head Construction course.  Click here or the images below to view these resources.

I have included the 3D models from my Form, Gesture, Anatomy course about building the skull.  This course provides students with many 3D models of this kind that can be viewed on your smart phone, tablet or computer.   This workshop will be run for 8 consecutive Sundays from the 13th March 2016.  A few places are still available at the time of writing so send me a message to enrol if you don't want to miss out!

To explore the model, click the triangular play button to load the embedded 3D model

Pinch to zoom on touch devices, a scroll with a mouse

Swipe to rotate on touch devices, or click drag to rotate with a mouse

This is one of the models from my artistic anatomy and life drawing course "Form, Gesture, Anatomy". More about this course, when and where the next one will run, and many free diagrams and course notes are available at the webpage: http://www.scottbreton.com.au/anatomy-and-gestural-figure-drawing


Zbrush Digital Sculpture Composition and its 3D print

This composition, also developed in ZBrush, reworks a couple of figures that I previously sculpted into a new composition (including the torso of the female figure in "Singularity Koan" in the preceding post).

The working title is "DNA to Digital" and is partially inspired by design motifs found in popular culture including sci fi action flick "Tron".  I find it fascinating to work in the digital realm and then pull the product of this work into our own physical space through 3D printing (I use a small home printer).   This sense of the two worlds we inhabit - the physical Earth and the online/digital - and the blurring of the line between them has inspired so much of popular culture as well as serious science fiction - and has become part of our contemporary mythology.

Digital Renders:

  3D Print:


Work in Progress - Zbrush digital sculpt and 3D Print

This year I bought the digital sculpting application Zbrush and have put quite a lot of time into learning the basics.

This is a sculpture I began in the free version of Zbrush "Sculptris" and then developed in Zbrush as I learned the software.

The title is "Singularity Koan".  Singularity here refers to the "Technological Singularity" that has been well discussed in the media.  Koan is a type unsolvable riddle or paradoxical saying used in Zen Buddhism to promote a shift in consciousness.     Contemplation of the apparent inevitability and concomitant uncertainty of the technological singularity had (and continues to have) a similarly disruptive effect on me - a jolt out of a customary, day-to-day dreary way of seeing the world and my life, into seeing our place in the broad sweep of history, and has caused me to question what is meaningful in my life and human life in general.  I have found this to be a refreshing, if startling, effect - much as a near death experience can be.   I will say no more and let you, dear viewer, investigate the symbols in the composition for yourself.

I am still working on this piece but it gives an idea of the composition at this stage.

Digital renders in Zbrush:

3D print:



Orpheus Digital sculpture

 

Digital sculpture done as a reference for developing an earlier composition about the Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice. Sculpted, painted, rendered and animated as a turntable in zBrush 4R7

Learning to sculpt digitally

I have recently begun to learn to sculpt digitally.  Though I find it useful to sculpt in clay to develop my figures in the round, I am pursuing digital sculpture as well in order to have greater freedom to play with the arrangement of figures in space.  This is inspired by such things as the sculptures of Bernini (see the next blog entry for some drawings of his "Apollo and Daphne", a magical spiralling orchestration of human figures, fabric, tree branches and the earth base) and my time studying with Nicola Verlato in Los Angeles, whose use of both physical and digital modeling techniques inform his wild symphonies of form.  

So here are my first efforts with Sculptris (a free program made by the makers of ZBrush).  The figures are based on reference from www.posespace.com, which provides artists with pictures of poses at 15 degree intervals all the way around.

Starting from a sphere, the forms of the head are gradually pulled and pushed out.Details can be added to the general forms

Again, starting with a sphere, I developed a symmetrical torso, posed it and added arms and legs, continuously rotating the piece to try to mentally integrate the forms from the flat screen as you would when working from life.a different view