In my previous post last March, I used ordinary objects found at home to create a physical maquette for my Mouse Monk character, as part of my assignment for Dorian Iten's The Shading Course online class. In that assignment, creating a physical maquette was a great idea-generating exercise. A starting point when ideas seemed elusive. But in this assignment, the character design was already clearly drawn. And from this, a digital maquette was created and used as my lighting reference.
Prior to this assignment, I have no experience in using Blender, a free 3d program. But since Dorian Iten used it heavily in his lectures for his online class, I decided to use it as well. Coincidentally, Marco Bucci, one of my fave art teacher, also just released a YouTube tutorial regarding using Blender as a digital painting tool. It's from this tutorial that I learned some really basic sculpting tools in Blender. And so I managed to create a simplified digital maquette of Raccoon Ninja.
Following closely how my old Raccoon Ninja drawing looked, I set up my character in the same perspective angle and played with different lighting schemes, just to understand how light and shadows fall on a character at different light directions. See below the four lighting schemes.
Eventually, I used the lighting scheme similar to what I had in the
drawing, which was from behind with the moon on upper screen left. Having this digital maquette really helped me resolved the lighting of the character and it's environment. Below was what I submitted to the class for Dorian's review and feedback.
And here's the final version of Raccoon Ninja. I'm quite pleased with what I've learned from the course. Dorian had been kind, encouraging, generous, and most importantly, a clear and concise art teacher who really knows how to teach,
Just for fun, here's a look at the different rendering versions of Raccoon Ninja from different periods of my art-learning journey.
