I made this 3 part tutorial as an effort to give back to the community and share knowledge.  Hope some of you find it useful!

Zbrush: Stylized Hair Sculpting Tutorial Series:

Bunch of paintings I’ve done in the last couple months.  Mostly on the new iPad M4.  The paintings not done on the latest iPad were all done on gen. 2 iPad Pro.  All procreate paintings.  Most of these are Dune 2 inspired, there is the young African American boy that is based closely off Meybis Ruiz Cruz’s work, and a couple of insta gram (ref shown) painting studies (sorry I don’t know by who).  My buddies Doberman Pinscher there as well.  First one is another insta gram painting study (but the original was done with traditional painting).  I tried to simulate that in Procreate with some cool brushes.  These are all loose studies really, I got a little too details on some and def. Not super happy with all of them, but I learned a lot and that is the point really with these.

Some tests in Marmoset Toolbag 4.  Keeping everything super loose still as I am planning on adding the prosthetics he has in the movie and a facial expression.  I think the likeness is close enough for this default pose, so I'll probably move onto xgen now.  Hopefully I'll dial in the likeness and realism a lot further as I get more of the pieces together.

It's been done a lot, but wanted to take a stab at this likeness of Heath Ledger from The Dark Knight for ages now.  I'm recording the process and will make an in-depth tutorial to go along with it.  Its very early yet, just blocking in the main landmarks and establishing likeness (along with running some facial expression tests)...  But its been going smoothly and I wanted to share the progress.  The Hair is most likely gonna be the most challenging here.  And I noticed it changes a lot in the movie, so I want to really capture how dynamic it can be.  Anyways, here is where I am at.

Some of my References: 

I made a quick tutorial I would like to share since this is something I didn't know till recently and I think its super useful and not well documented.  Simply put, in zbrush you might loose your morph target or layer but were careful to keep your vertex order the same on a model.  Here is how you restore it so you can work more non-destructively.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_wCRAMEB8M

My first attempt at painting portrait on iPad while I’m traveling for the holiday. As much as I love clip studio paint on the iPad, I don’t like monthly subscription and unfortunately they don’t even have an option for standalone licenses on the iPad. :(.  Anyway I decided to give procreate a try while on vacation since I’m mostly limited to making art on my iPad on trains and airplanes.  As usual, another game of thrones traditional portrait “Stannis”, hope you like it and let me know if you have any questions.

Early Wip:

Sorta been forgetting about the blog here on artstation. I’ve been working on all kinds of stuff tho as usual.  I wonder does anyone find this useful? Please let me know in the comments so I can gauge the interest.  Cause if it’s just me talking to myself I probably shouldn’t bother most the time. lol.

Anyway, I thought this was cool… I bought a laptop on sale with a 4090 i9 and 64 gb ram. It’s a beast, and the main goal was to try and do professional level art easily on the go.

I found out about easy canvas pro which essentially turns your iPad into a cintiq and let me tell you it’s pretty amazing!  I also use a razor gamer pad thing which for the most part enables me to work entirely without a keyboard and super quick since it’s all hotkeyed.

Anyway, the plan is to eventually make a YouTube video on the setup cause I feel like most the demos you see out there are not really geared towards industry professionals. This tech isn’t exactly new for instance, I think it’s been around for a couple of years now.

I’m also learning blender, so I’ll go ahead and build this sculpt here to full quality and render 100% on my iPad via 1x usb c… laptop to ipad  setup seen here. It’ll be good for me to learn blender and show what can be done with this setup. 

Feel free to ask if you have any questions on this. I’m gonna follow thru with the artwork and tutorials either way, again just wondering if folks find value in the blog here. 

Cheers,

Recorded my process for making a base head sculpt in zbrush from a sphere.  The process should be part of a larger tutorial series I'm working on, so I can't share that yet.  But, thought I'd share the mesh with the community incase anyone finds it helpful.  Also, figured it would be nice to have a female base mesh as well, so I did a very quick sculpt of Daenery's Targaryen from GOT on a layer in zbrush.  I didn't bother trying to spotlight match references or break A symmetry, so its really basic still.  I hope I still captured some likeness, but I'm not totally sure honestly.  Either way, I thought her face would work well as a generic female face as a starting point.  

If you have any questions please let me know, thanks for looking!  Oh, and besides being able to easily swap this mesh from a base male to female mesh, it also has uv's. :)    Download the BaseMesh with Male/Female Morphtargets here: 

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ew9ubflgsatpv44f0pmm5/Male_Female_BaseMesh.ztl?rlkey=82l1jt1fbpdwmd9g19yxivjky&dl=0

This .ztl is compatible with zbrush 2022.0.7 and later.

If you want to know more about blocking in a head or practice yourself I have a bunch of content about this on my artstation here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/dKLPGA