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