Sculpts n History n Stuff

 Age of Empires

I'm quite interested in history and the origins of stuff.  Its great to help understand why we do "stuff" and puts everything into scale.  Some of the earliest pre-historic stuff is of course "fundamental", but sowed the seeds of what we find pleasing/awful, cool or boring.  It's also worth thinking about the scale of humanity - there are few sculptures/statues/figures which date back to 33,000 BC (around the ice age where everything got a bit fucky).  Some of the earliest carvings are ivory, and of course the materials became more refined as people progressed (there are no new materials since that time, only methods of combining and farming them).  So - even back then art reflected life/society which evolved after humanity got a foothold and didn't have to hunt or hide all the time... which is nice.

Women are from Venus

Venus of Willendorf (limestone/Austria) 20,000 -26,000 BC

Venus De Milo / Aphrodite/Amphitrite (100-200BC Roman, possible replica of Greek 2,000 BC'ish)

The human form is an old favourite - Many pre-historic finds appear to be female effigies that probably represent fertility, life and birth (which is an epidemic now).  Anyways I'm not going to quote a load of books and websites - I want to incorporate the "primitive art" style into my final project - I'm considering making a Colossus, but want it to look prime-evil, almost like the earth made it intentionally, like an ancient guardian or deity.

Empires rise and fall, just like the Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, even the English empire has diminished and evolved across the great ocean to create western civilization.  Anyways I was researching a bit while I made this torso - Which is a lost classical example of the evolution in art - from figurative to realistic.  Before a few thousand years ago we only depicted the form in an abstract way, the ancient Greeks are famous for bringing the human form to life - even though the anatomy here looks a bit Anime it was revolutionary - the shifted weight, stepping forward and twisting the torso slightly.  These things we all take for granted now.

Quick sculpt of the "Miletus Torso" currently held at the Louvre (4096px DNS, 4K tris)

I'm a bit busy with course work and you know... life.  But enjoyed discovering a little more about art history.  I made it in a couple of hours - Not really a portfolio piece but good practice at texturing and retopo'ing in Zbrush into UDK.  The material is a variant of an auto-colouring one I made in UDK, notice the different tones?  that's because it changes according to world location.  The texturing is bullshit, and not a real serious stab at replication.  Nowadays if the Louvre wanted a digital record (which they should) it would be done with cameras/scanned.


Here's some speed paints I did in the week

"Tremor"

"Nomad"

Oh yeah - Here's a turn table of my Vehicle so far - Idea stolen from the game "Metal Slug" but is a digger (using a Caterpillar digger for reference so might call it a "Metal Cat?" nah.)