Dragon Villain

Introduction

This piece I made specifically for this contest, as other examples of my work can be found on my profile! I completely forgot about this competition so I wasn't able to give myself a ton of time. Also, the week I created this project just so happened to be the week that I ended up going on holiday, meaning that I didn't have access to a laptop or computer. Everything I did was done within Nomad Sculpt on iPad, but it would have been nice to mess around with Substance Painter to give this project an added level of detail. Either way though, I am happy with the result, and it also gave me more of an opportunity to discover more of Nomad Sculpt.

Hope you enjoy!

Description

For this project, I had in mind a concept for a draconic villain. This is symbolised by the use of blacks and reds, but contrasted with the gold and an addition of a halo to imply a 'fallen angel' of sorts.

The skin texture was made using the stamp tool which Nomad offers, and all the materials were painted onto him using the paint tool. By adjusting the colours' settings, I was able to create some glass looking spikes, as well as gold accents for the horns and the belly scales. 

I added 3 lights around the halo to make it look more like a halo. I originally wanted light to be emitted from the halo, but I couldn't find how to do this in Nomad Sculpt. I worked around this, and just made it so its lit up a bit.

I was inspired by a mini dragon statue I own, and wanted to try and make something based off of that idea.

I also used a drawing of a dragon I did a while ago as the base of the head. I've mentioned on the post of that piece on my portfolio, that I really want to make a sculpture of it one day, so it was perfect for this project.

References

(Unfortunately, I dropped him before I was able to take some pictures of him, and his head came off. That's why he's being held together by a piece of blue tack).

Process

I started off by blocking out the shapes I wanted. I have never made a sculpture this way before as I usually do something piece by piece, like I would work on the head then move onto the body etc. but I wanted to see if this way would work out for me. I personally didn't feel a difference, other than it gave me the opportunity to map out the pose straight away rather than during the process.

After mapping everything out, I started with the head, trying to get a good expression on his face. Then it came to making the bottom jaw look nice and seamless with the rest of the head, and added a tongue to give the piece some life and personality.

Afterwards, I moved onto the body, and tried to get all of the belly scales done and looking good. They were probably the most frustrating part of this project as it was just doing the same thing over and over again.

Next came the tail, which was fine. The difficult part here was getting the belly scales to turn around with the tail, as the tail isn't flat in a straight line. 

Then I moved onto the legs by starting with the front 2 and moving my way backwards. I especially love how the back legs came out.

Then came all the extra detail such as the horns, spikes and halo. He might still be missing his wings, but these details really tied it all together! (I was also putting off doing the wings).

The rock didn't take too much time as I kind of just stamped it and smoothed it and pulled it and smoothed it again, until it looked vaguely like a rock.

Eventually came the time to do the wings. The challenging bit of this part was figuring out how to do the skin. I ended up taking a sphere and flattening it, and scaling it until it was the same size. Then I cut pieces of it so it looks like a dragon wing, and nudged it into place. 

Effects/Details

Ambient occlusion allowed me to create great depth within this piece by adding a lot of dramatic shadow. Without it, it decreases the quality of the dragon, and takes away its menacing aura.

I also used bloom in order to up the luminosity of the lighting, as well as the shine of the golden parts.

Tone mapping gave it more vibrancy and colour. Without it, the dragon looks really washed out and plain looking.

Curvature helped with the depth, as it allowed me to add shine so the scales of the body, and shadows within each crevice.

I included vignette, just to make the background look more intimidating.

Sharpness then just brought the quality of the sculpture up a notch.

Thanks for looking!!