ZBrushCentral

Ecorche WIP

Hey guys. First post here. Skip below if you don’t care about the intro. I started learning oil painting mostly through self study and a mentor roughly two years ago, and since then my art journey has taken me all over the place. Though I still love oil painting, I’m fairly turned off by the gallery scene and the idea of painting things that sell, as my style tends towards darker, more paranoid, chiarascuro-style paintings that most people would probably pay money to have removed from their walls. My favorite painters would be Rembrandt, Rubens (The hell paintings, mostly), Zdzislaw Beksinski, and Odd Nerdrum. For those of you who know of their work, that probably paints a pretty good impression of the stuff I aim to one day create.

Seven or so months ago I decided to take the turn towards learning concept art and illustration. I spent a good five months learning the ins and outs of photoshop, digital painting, and clip studio paint, whilst also doing daily gesture drawing, speed paintings, and composition studies. One day while browsing Gnomon I found a video on utilizing Zbrush for concept art. After seeing that, every dime was set aside for purposes of getting Zbrush. Finally, a few days after release of 4R7, I had enough to make my purchase.

These sculpts are my first real attempts at sculpture, and I’d love to hear feedback. That said, I’ve focused very little on achieving realistic color or interesting composition. The intention for these first sculptures was to better learn anatomy for the final ecorche and to figure out the Zbrush workflow.

For reference, I’m using Scott Spencer’s Zbrush book on Anatomy, as well as all three of Phillipe Faraut’s traditional sculpture books, and a couple of anatomy books I purchased while focusing intently on figure drawing.

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Hi JGan.
good start go on like this.

Hey Zaya. Thanks for looking! I’ll definitely be continuing these sorts of studies. I’ve found that 3D, be it digital or clay, is the best way to truly learn anatomy. It’s important to me to have a very strong understanding of anatomy, as I don’t want to feel totally reliant on reference images while painting and drawing, and I’m primarily interested in figurative works.

Here’s a newer psuedo-ecorche I’ve started. I’m not building up every single bone in traditional ecorche manner, but I am always thinking about what muscles are attaching to and originating from, and I intend to delineate between bone and musculature in the end. A couple of months ago I could only name maybe five muscles. As of today, I know roughly thirty, and further I know the various heads and bony landmarks to which they belong. I also knew next to nothing about Zbrush in the beginning, and now I feel I understand it quite completely! I’ve still got a huge way to go, but I’m pretty proud of my progress so far. Learning is too much fun.

My previous versions suffered from an excessive softness. During the sculpting process, I was losing sight of my planes too much. I’ve tried to remedy this by always keeping a planes layer handy. Also, I hope I’m not breaking the no-nudity rules for thumbnails. There are no genitals, so I figured it would be OK.

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well, genitals are also anatomy. i think nudity is no problem as long it is not posted as pornografic or similar content.
I am working in the medical teaching field and it would be a problem if could not show nudity in our Illustrations :slight_smile:

All I know is that showing genitals is evil.
And censoring of anything is good and it works. It has done lots of great things for the humanity.
Also the sculpts are rather unrefined thus needing lots more work.

Zaya, I definitely agree. I personally have no issue with nudity, but I definitely wouldn’t want to get someone in trouble were they browsing through ZBC at work.

Here’s another update. I’ve refined the muscles a bit more, worked the face a bit, and added more forearm definition. I’m currently working to finish the forearm and hand, but I’ve been finding it to be a rather tricky area so it’s coming along quite slowly.


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