Dragon egg project (wip)

WIP Project: Dragon eggs

(Note: W.I.P stands for Work In Progress. Posts tagged with WIP can be voted on here in order to encourage me to re-prioritize what to work on)

The Dragon egg project consists of trying to make a mould for wax casting cool fantasy candles. The first idea I had is of a simple candle wax egg, hence the name. 

First attempts at a dragon egg model.

First attempt at a mould

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Mould with tabs to ease opening, holes to line up the pattern, and notch to see how the parts are oriented.

I expect the first version to have a few problems, mainly the pattern might be too detailed, and when trying to remove the candle from the mould I expect it to be stuck, I may have to print the model itself and do a latex cast of it instead of 3D print it directly. I want to 3D print and test it to be sure however, I won't know if it has failed before it has failed after all. Another problem is that it has overhangs and can't be printed in the orientation I wanted.

The next version I am working on will have arched legs stuck to a larger surface of the egg body, for strength and avoiding overhangs when 3D printing.

Dream Bestiary project (wip)

WIP Project: Dream Bestiary

(Note: W.I.P stands for Work In Progress. Posts tagged with WIP can be voted on here in order to encourage me to re-prioritize what to work on)

Dreams are a core interest of mine that I never tire from talking about. I document, study, and draw inspiration from my own subconscious dreams. In order to do something concrete and perhaps commercially viable with the subject matter, I'm thinking about embarking upon a quest of documenting all hopefully most of the strange creatures that form in them. This project is in it's early idea phase, with some sketches and paintings having started. If I were to make a book, I'd either select a simpler art style and redraw the creatures clearly to communicate their designs more easily, or perhaps just select art styles that suit the individual creatures. The original sketches seem too raw and messy to make sense to anyone but me, I fear. I'd like to self publish the results eventually, if I do take this path.

Older examples of unprocessed dream sketches below.
To see dream sketches as I upload them, or to see my dream folder follow me on Deviantart. (That is where all my art images are hosted)

dream sketch: masked characters

Dream sketch: infant bird mole with chains?

Work In Progress - Decide what I do next

Want to affect what I do? Now is your chance!

WIP stands for Work In Progress.
I have got many ideas I would like to work on in the nebulous "some day" time. Most of my projects start off enthusiastically before I forget them in a corner somewhere. In order to complete more projects I have now decided to keep a little directory here with projects that have gone on ice. If you want to see me work on that project, all you have to do is comment about it, this will be sufficient external motivation to rejuvenate my enthusiasm and re prioritize (within reason).

This post will be updated to list blog entries tagged with WIP as I document and upload them.

WIP: Aquarium sculpture

WIP: Fantasy wax candles

WIP: 3D Printed stamps and seals

WIP: Ridiculous Dreamcatchers 

WIP: Dream Creature Bestiary

WIP: Dragon Bestiary

WIP: Masks

WIP: Ugly Duckling

WIP: Dream Fakemon Bestiary

WIP: VR experimental interactive gallery

3D modelling: stamp part 2

(part 0) (part 1)
Yesterday I said I had made some progress on learning how to use blender, and today I made my first (purposeful) model! It is probably not as optimal as it could be, I had to hack it together with my limited knowledge. Seeing as it's for 3D print, polycount and such is not really a concern for me (that I know of).

 What you see here is my logo stamp (v1.0) the green is the handle, the red is a dish to hold the sugru (stamp surface) and the brown is essentially a cast for the sugru to go in. I suspect the design is too minute to really get all the details, nor do I know how minute details the Ultimaker 3D printers can really do, but I shall see. Worst case scenario, I will print it larger. It's designed to be about 2-3 cm in diameter across the dish. I am also considering what other material could replace the sugru, it is definitely the most costly part of this plan (I'm planning to make many), and I'm sure there are other moldable materials that might hold/print ink/liquids better than sugru around. I'm not up to date on clays and such, so suggestions are very welcome.

As I modelled it, I was realizing it might be hard to remove the cast from the sugru and to get the sugru to stick to the correct surface and not just get pulled back out. I will have to test this. I added 2 flaps to the cast to make it easier to grab. I hope they are not too thin and will break. I will test it and see if I shall make them bigger for v.2.

I wanted the red dish to screw onto the handle, but screws were a bit too advanced for me to get my head around right now, so I will just glue it on and hope for the best. Alternatively I might make the dish square and have it slide onto the handle, but that doesn't look as cool in my opinion.

Messy blender mesh from messy illustrator path. 

 The logo was imported from Illustrator, I did have some trouble with that due to how I initially created it: with an automatic conversion from a raster image to vector, (I then manually went and deleted hundreds of vector anchor points and adjusted them to fit, I found this process easier than creating a path with the standard pen tools and tracing it myself. The reason for this is I get stuck in "making perfect curves" who end up ruining the design. By converting it I get the design straight away, but a messy path. it works for 2D.) Of course that made it convert poorly in blender, paths were crossed, facing odd directions, who knows. After making the path function (I got some help), the extrusion went mostly fine, I had to patch up a missing face and make sure the model was watertight. (In blender this is called Manifold, I have yet to learn how to use this word in a sentence. "The model is Manifold?" sounds as alien as 3D modeling is to reality haha.)

Blender screenshot: logo impressed into cylinder with boolean operation.

When I have tested it and settled on decent version, I will upload the stamp design to thingiverse (or something like it) under creative commons licence, yay for sharing! (there are already some good stamp designs on thingiverse, but I wanted my own handle, round and grippy) I will make a new post when I have a working version, so stay tuned.

30 Themes challenge

Moved this here  http://blueskyfeesh.blogspot.co.uk/p/30-themes-challenge.html

Leopard eyes

I made this in my last uni project, though this isn’t the final. It was a musing about the leopard spots looking like eyes when I had to draw realistic looking leopards for my own take on a WWF campaign.

WIP Characterization of the offlicence members

Been wanting to make a splash for our little forum, trying to figure out how to represent people is really hard but also quite amusing. I got this far but now I'm bored with it, and by uploading this wip I have cursed it for nevercompletion. If any of you offlicencees can see this, why don't you suggest how to represent remaining members and maybe... maybe it will be done one day.

Completed contest entry

I entered a contest to draw a baby elite from the halo franchise, here is the final piece:

Here is the updated WIP with loose explenations.

Baby elite WIP v.2

Here is my current progress on a picture I started for a contest on Deviantart.

Click here to see it bigger.

Slenderman Uni Project

Below you see version 4 of my Slenderman scetch.

It is a work in progress for my uni summer project. It is themed "urban legends and myth" and I chose slenderman. He may not be a "real" legend, but people actually believe in him, or did, anyway. He is a very fascinating subject.

I like the idea of a slenderman whom, once you see, will hunt you down, but If you pretend not to notice and go on with your business, you may just convince him you didn't see and you can get lucky and live to tell the tale. Whatever business he's up to, I'd like it to be more complicated, sinister and mysterious than just plain old murdering/raping people, so i would love to add to the sort of lore surrounding him. Like if he actually puppeteers humans to make them do horrible things, or even take on a politician to do damage to society as a whole. I think that would put more pressure on the situation if you were to see him, because you "should" do something about it, like report to authorities, yet the moment you admit to seeing him, you are most likely going to die.

What i'm doing with the picture here, is try to get a good composition, while leading the viewers eye to allways return to slender man. I'm not quite there yet, would love to hear some feedback on this. I added the tree to cover up parts of the foreground to give the viewer a sense of being in the shot, and thus have reason to be unnerved. I would love some feedback on weither you find this makes it more or less unnerving. The lamp is for light and size reference. If you were to guess, how tall does slenderman seem to be, and do you think the perspective is ok? Any other feedback is welcome, but I barely begun the process of rendeing, but you can comment on that too if you want.