Week 35 - Sketchbook Tour

0This week I really wanted to focus on improving the quality of the sculpts rather than making a bunch of fast ones, not only because these sketches are also supposed to serve as reference for my characters, but because of their unique structures; it's a way to practice character design. 

With Aisling specifically, she is an NPC in my Dungeons & Dragons Curse of Strahd campaign, so there was conversation with my Game Master as to how to infer her personality just based on her neutral head design. This was mainly done through the cheekbones, specifically the masseter muscle and how wide it makes the face; she could be stern, sharp, or soft just depending on that muscle

Arwyn Lunavyr, Demo head (5hr -- 04/14)

One of my students asked me to record a demo of my process for making head sketches, specifically focusing on how to go from a low-fidelity mesh to a high-finished sculpt. I started with the default man body and worked from there.

I did record making the hair, although the file corrupted so only the head sculpting portion is available

Aisling, The Dreamer - Head Refinement (6hr session, 7hr total -- 04/17)

Rhian the White Rose - Head Refinement (3hr session, 3hr 30m total -- 04/18)

Resources:

The resources in this section are relatively light, as I'm primarily using the same tools & methods that I have before; however, I do want to show off the main tools that I've been using:

For the most part I only use five or six brushes, including the move tool, with two of them being focused on hair & creating hair subtools. A lot of the heavy lifting is done by the GIO soft forms brush which I can use to crease forms and then create a sharp contrast above with the same line for further definition. The second most used tool is the default move brush which helps me get a lot of the forms where I need them.

For the hair I used a mix of the different methods I've been learning while doing my sketches

I used the hair to create a sense of difference/slight asymmetry in the design, since one comment I received was how symmetrical every piece was. The picture below shows the symmetry in the hair strands and specifically how it can be slightly broken up.

This picture shows the different methods being used: 

• The dark blue is Mark Lambert's method of the bend curve deformer, using points to move the strands into place. 
• The light blue eyebrows were extruded from the face and softened into place. 
• The orange strands used a hair IMM brush from Arystan to align with the main hair mass, then, using the move tool, put into their appropriate place. 
• Finally, the green mass was originally a sphere deformed into the rough shape, then combined with a hair cap from the skull and carved into.

NOTE: I tried to find my link to Arystan's hairbrushes, but it looks like they got removed in the FlippedNormals murder of 2026 :(—they are for the most part a simple flattened tube!

Aisling uses the same methods;

• The red is Mark Lambert's curve deformer; since Aisling's hair is pulled back, it's mainly being used for accents
• the yellow eyebrows and hair cap were extruded from the head and carved appropriately
• the purple uses Arystan's hair strands to both conform to the head and create flyaways in the main braid
• I didnt use initialized shapes, but I did end up using two IMM brushes, from Al Sadany, to create the complex braid structure, both along the edges of the hair and for the main braid

I did add one new tool to this process, a very nice chain IMM brush by Roger Perez for Arwyn's circlet and for any future jewelry that I need.