The Clay Modelling

 

We had to start by crushing tin foil up into a ball. This would make our starting head, then we had to mould the ball into the shape of a skull. This is so we can get the jaw in the right place, and all of the other facial features.

 

We then used sculpting tools to create the eye sockets and to detail the jaw line and the rest of the head, afterward we had to crush down the head onto a pike for ease of modelling.I had crushed my foil into a tight ball, so at the pike stabbing time, I had a bit of trouble and had to find a stanley knife.

 

We then got the two types of clay. One was a hard, tough texture and the other was a quite doughey, and extremely sticky texture, but we had to merge them together to make a compound that had a solidity, but stuck really well. Almost the same as when we were using the "Green Stuff".

 

I began to roll my clay compound and flattened it to make a flat overlay onto my foil skull. When it was placed, I hat to make sure it was all smooth and I had to push the clay into the eye sockets and mould it to my faces shape. When doing this, I moulded the left eye socket so it will turn out to look the same as the gaping hole I have in my Photoshop picture. (See past post for reference)

 

The main mould has dried now and I need to add the fauxhawk in. I created my compound and then placed it on the head and as you would presume, started pushing in and up to get that curve in. Once it was there and I had a look, it made my head look bigger than it should and the curve was too intense. So, I made another compound and added a new layer on top, looking to far out on the sides, I had to push up until the sides were relative to the head width and make a slight concave curve up to the tip of my hair, then I had to try and make it relevant to the picture with the curve that went down the tip of my hair.

 

Finally getting that out of the way, I began to add in the actual eye and I got to using the crafting tools. I started by trying to scrape away at my hair to make it look as thought it was threads of hair, but it didn't turn out the greatest. I also scraped away at the inside of the eye socket, which turned out better and actually looked quite close to the photoshop picture. In this I tried scraping in a beard and edited the eyeball.

 

My eyeball has fell out during the weekend, and I'm rather annoyed as it has gone missing, unfortunately, we are on a tight schedule as well and I need to get a start on the ZBrush piece so I need to leave this for now. 

Sculpture Project

 

We have been assigned a project to design our own faces to look like a zombie version. This will involve us having our photo's taken, then we will convert to Photoshop and edit our faces with burn and dodge tools whilst blending cutouts of zombie images from the internet. Once this is done, we will be transferring to a clay type material and creating a physical model from the zombie reference picture we made on Photoshop. Once this is completed, we shall be using the refence picture, and our physical model to create another head model on a program called ZBrush.

 

 

The Camera and Photoshop

 

So we have had all of our pictures taken and this is what mine turned out to be...

Front



Side



Perspective

These will be my starting point pictures, I will crop them down as I won't need the excess space and the shadow, and I will have to allign them into orthographic set so I don't create the zombie effects a little offset on another image.

 

This is my orthographic guidlines picture. I had to line up ll of the pictures with each other. In this I had to place straight horizontal lines through all of the main features of my face; Chin, nose, bottom of the ear, top of the ear, start of my fauxhawk, and the tip of my fauxhawk. This assures me that I will not get any mess ups when I start to allign facial tearing or missing organs between each picture.

 

This is the start of my editing. I have began to make a rough blend of deep bags under my eyes and some markings on my face. I have also toned down the enture colour depth to give all of my skin a more undead grey colour.

 

 

Now I've began adding more decay markings across my face. I have also recoloured my lips to look like they have lost colour due to death and I've removed my left eyebrow. As daft as it looks right now, I've found a great picture that I find that removing the eyebrow will provide a better outcome from my next edit.

 

This is the reason for removing the eyebrow, I have added in an image from a zombie I found with his eye missing. While it is quite blatand right now it is a seperate picture placed on my face, I will start editing the colors and blend it on. I have also added on some scratch marks to the side of my face.

I have edited the colour again to make myself whiter, I have also blended the pictures I added, whilst the addition of my neck piece. Now the eye looks more appropriate and the side of my face has been blended to look like dirt, or possibly scratches to the face.

These are some quick adjustments I made. the neck and the eye looked a little flat, so I adjusted the colours and contrast to give it a slight bump map to bring out the details in the eye arch and also in the neck foldings.

 

I've finally got to changing the hair correctly. And my beard is no longer a ginger colour. I have a more dead looking feel now and I have once again toned down the colour of the entire picture as well. This has worked in favour to my lips as thel look like they've been in the cold hard ground for some time now.

Coming on to the end, I edited my eye to be bigger and my pupil to be extremely dilated. I also splashed in some quick red lines to make my eye look as though it had become blood shot.

Creating a quick change from merging all of the images together and then adjusting it to black and white, I have a greyscale image of my zombie self and I can now make the final adjustment of bump mapping the final product and I can say that I am finished with the Photoshop stage.

The Final Piece.