When I was a kid, I remember waking up every Saturday morning while my parents were still asleep, getting a giant bowl of Cookie Crisp and watching cartoons until lunch. I loved shows like Thundarr the Barbarian, Dungeons and Dragons, He-Man, The Mighty Orbots and my favorite, Thundercats. I really liked all the characters but my favorite was always Panthro. He seemed like the toughest Thundercat out of all of them and had, what I thought to be, the coolest weapon. The NUMCHUCKS! ..or nunchaku if you want to be all technical. Here’s some images of Panthro from the original show.

I thought it would be fun to make a Panthro model but it would be too time consuming to do another full character like the Baroness so I decided to go with a bust. I started with a torso I had already created from another character and reshaped him into Panthro, adding his gear and spikes from basic primitive shapes in zbrush. I didn’t want to redesign him but there were certain things I didn’t like about the original that I wanted to adjust like the spikes on his gear. They were really thin and flimsy looking in the cartoon so I bulked them up and shortened them. The other thing was his nose. In the cartoon they have very human-looking noses but I thought it would be cooler to make his nose more cat-like. Once I was happy with everything, I gave him a slight snarl, found a Thundercats font, modeled his name for the base and I was done!

After looking at the bust for a while, I thought it would be fun to pose him in a fighting stance. Since his numchucks have a very long chain, I thought it would be cool to have him holding one end and then have the other end going back under his opposite arm as if he had just caught it there. After some final touch ups in photoshop, Panthro was done!

I hope you guys dig it and check back next week for more Saturday morning cartoon art!

Chris

Hey everyone!

I've always been a big fan of GIJoe and I had a huge collection of toys as a kid, so when we decided on the theme, I was really excited. One of my favorite comic book artists is J Scott Campbell known for his Danger Girl and Wildsiders comics. He's drawn the Baroness for GiJoe comics before and I've always wanted to model a character in his style so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity. I started with a simple base mesh that I tried to match to one of his drawings from Danger Girl, just to get the proportions correct. Her face and legs went through a lot of revisions before I finally got a look that I was happy with.

Once I had the sculpting finished, I started adding different materials to her, giving her suit a latex look and a dark gun metal shader for all the plating.

After putting the Cobra emblem on her chest with a red matte shader, I started to pose her for the final image. I found one of Campbell's GiJoe covers and tried to mimic the pose he drew her in. After the pose was complete, I gave her a pistol, added a background with the Cobra logo and that was it! I hope you guys dig it.

Stay tuned for more GIJoe art over the next couple weeks!

Chris

Greetings! Hope y’all are enjoying the blogs as much as we are making the art. Great job to Kube and Nate for their amazing works!

When Bart announced the ‘Clash of the Titans’ theme, I knew right away it had to be Medusa. Back when the movie came out, I was around 7 or so and I remember going with the family to the drive-in to see the Muppet Movie, or something kid friendly, and ‘Clash of the Titans’ was on another screen. I couldn’t stop watching it and  when they got to Medusa’s lair, I remember being SO stressed out, even without sound! Anyway, when they first reveal Medusa’s eyes, just before she turns one of her victims into stone, I remember that image being burned into my brain. It scared the crap out of me. So for this challenge I wanted to try and recreate that image as it might appear in a remake of the film. (which actually does come out next year……..directed by Louis Leterrier……starring Sam Worthington. :).

I thought it would be fun and less time consuming to do a bust, so I started with a simple base mesh to get started in ZBrush. At first I thought I would do a really thin, lean version but as I started to add more details, everything started to fill out. I positioned her torso forward with her neck out as if she’s slithering along in her lair searching for intruders and hissing. I eventually sculpted her mouth open and started adding teeth. I really wanted her to look mean and wrinkling the nose up with the brow down usually works but the nose was starting to look kind of large and masculine her brow was coming down too far and wrinkling in the middle. I really wanted her eyes to be wide open and having the brow down wouldn’t work. I was going to have to make some adjustments.

I decided to focus on something else and come back to the nose and brow later. I started adding some color and small details like scales and veins in areas I was happy with. Next I moved to the snakes. Ideally, it would be great to have all the snakes visibly attach to the head but that would mean I would have to sculpt each individual snake and that would take FOREVER, so I made one snake at first. I sculpted the mouth in a relaxed pose and then I made 2 copies of that snake, one with the mouth closed and one wide open. Then I posed a few with the mouth closed and a few with the mouth open and started copying them all over the head, adjusting when necessary to avoid intersections. After getting some feedback from my fellow Art Bots I made the necessary adjustments to the face to make her look more feminine but still scary and I was done with the sculpt!

The next part was getting everything ready for the final images. I rendered a dozen different passes of the bust from both camera angles that I would then layer together in photoshop to get the final look I was going for. This is time consuming but a lot of fun. Once all the render passes were together, I then adjust layer opacities and blend modes  until everything reads well. After a few touch-ups to the eyes to make them brighter and some color tweaks, I was done!

I had a lot of fun with this sculpt and I hope you enjoyed the making of!

Chris