The idea started when I was researching Gargoyles and was looking at steam-punk sculptures. I fell in love with the idea of an octopus / kraken gargoyle but thought it was just too simple. (I also thought a plain old naked lady was too obvious / boring). Although I have spent the last few weeks tearing myself out of how to be 'different' I have come back to my original passion, but from a new perspective. Something that I have noticed within my design document which I created at the start of the project this time because in BA1 I made my PDF hours before hand in (which looked crap) is that subconsciously I doodled little tentacles in the bottom corner with the intention of going back and changing it later. Ironically, what was my first idea is now my last, and I think that's kind of creepy and sweet.
Anyway back to the fact that I've finally been able to settle on my idea. After seeing a beautiful sculpture of an octopus on Pinterest, I fell back in love with the idea of a tentacular creature. The way the octopus was posed I could imagine a female bust rising from the body. I found a reference image of a ladyperson and produced a quick sketch as shown above.
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| This is the angle I want her to be as a gargoyle. I will be altering the tentacles so that water can be drained through them and through her body. She will also have a tentacle extended in front to hold a lantern. |
The rest of the development came from a whim and procrastination... It was about 2AM and I decided that it was the perfect time to challenge myself with Zspheres and try to make an armature for my squid-lady. At this point I'm loving the shape I've made and 'bake' the model and begin sculpting on it. I gave up several times on the model because I kept stretching the sculpt and although I was in Dynamesh I couldn't get any more detail to the face without making the whole model 4 million polys. I had a scratch around my air filled brain and decided to make a separate (very very bad) head. I know right now I'm sounding like I hate my own model but I couldn't love it more. In another one of my stresses I began adding bits using the Quad Curve Fill tool (yey me) and taking bits out, the exposed rib cage, with the ALT+ function. I added some arms and my first thought was to extend them as if she was addressing something infront of her, however I felt it was too similar to other people's sculpts. I then had dramas with sculpting the arms so I added a new subtool again and made some Zsphere arms and was playing around with different poses. I ended up having her holding her head which at the time didn't have a neck because of creating it as a separate subtool you forget vital things such as necks. So my a culmination of stressy rage and sheer mistake, I ended up with an amazing starting point to my final sculpt. I loved the way she appears to be writhing in pain as she struggles to hold her own head. It came to me that everything about her symbolised my constant struggle with BA2 and also the way I felt the day before sculpting her. It's been emotional, I've missed a lot of lessons and I don't ever want this to happen again, so I'm going to channel all this negative energy into my final sculpt to create something very meaningful and believable. I have a whole load of ideas for iteration and even a back story as to how she came to be in her world. She will be placed at the front of a ship or Zeppelin as a combined figurehead and gargoyle.
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