Think Anime, Yaoi, the urban legend. I really like this piece, which I call "Urban Warrior." It has a smoldery sensuality without the need for, um, skin. This is one of my theatrical company of characters, but I switched his hair color over to copper-red...Incidentally, the hair color switch was NOT done using a "material" or "texture" sold by the company that designed the hair. If you know what you're doing, you can change the hair color yourself. You need to know a good deal about "surfaces" to do this. Do the terms "specular" and "diffuse" and "ambient" mean anything to you?! Get your teeth into DAZ -- really sink them in and start chomping! -- and they soon will.
Anyway, the character is a fairly simple pose; what makes the shot really work is the chiseled face (my design), the generic weirdness of the abstract background, and the fade effect...
Now, the background was created in Serif X3 ... it's about 10 layers of fades and transparencies, and one 3D object which was, again, created from 10 layers of effects before being locked into the background as part of it. The image was then exported at 200dpi, imported into DAZ as the background, rendered along with this terrific incarnation of the Michael 4 model, and then shipped back into Serif X3 to have the fade added, before it was exported for the last time at 300dpi as the finished piece.
Here's the same character with the clothing objects turned OFF, and the hair still set on blond ... stretched out on a hearthrug, watching the fire -- at least, he will be, when I've engineered the rug and the hearth! This is the basic model ... you add the rest of the elements later, and when I finish the piece, I'll upload it finished:
It's handy being able to click an icon and turn on and off the clothes, shades, boots, even the hair style. You can get some, uh, wild and wonderful effects!
And if you'd like to see where I am one year later, here's a slideshow of October 2010 artwork:
Please so browse around and watch the artist's progress! I was pondering whether to take down these early posts where the art is so comparatively simple, and I actually woke up to the word "comparatively." At the time -- it wasn't simple at all. I had figure everything out, and the purpose of these early posts was to record my journey from the start to the culmination. So instead of taking down the simpler art I decided to gussy up the early posts with slideshows and, soon, videos, and perhaps encourage folks who are just starting out to stick with it, never say die, and ... enjoy the process.
Jade, 14 October 2009
