Day 7 of my 30 Day 3D challenge and things are beginning to get serious. I tend to spend more and more time on a single project, I am already feeling exhausted. Anyway, we’ll see how far I’ll go.

Today I sculpted baby Mike Wazowsky from Monsters inc. Let me start by saying that I loooooove Mike Wazowski, I have watched Monsters inc. and Monsters University about 50 times, I even have a Mike Wazowski shaped pillow I hug when I sleep. (Yes, really!) So I started today’s challenge determined to give my best self. 🙂

Generally, it was a very ambitious project, that, technically speaking, I wasn’t quite ready for. But … he was Mike! I had to make an effort.

The first task was to make a nice eye of cource! Since it’s Mike’s trademark. There were no shortcuts here. I ended up painting the eye from scratch. Felt momentarily in my comfort zone. But I dismissed the feeling, because the whole point of this challenge is to push me out of my comfort zone.

And then came Mike himself. I normally have no problem getting the likeness of my subject when working in 2D. With 3D … it is more complex. My main issue is that you can do the same thing in countless ways, and you need to find the best way each time. It’s worse than programming.

And at last comes the post-sculpting part (post-production? how is it even called?), where I added the scene (which was painted in procreate), the lightning, and the rest of the visual effects. I think this is becoming my favorite part of the whole process, all credits go to my 2D background!

Overall I’m happy with today’s progress. There are certain things that need polishing up of course, but just like everything, it’s a matter of practice.