Only one image, again ... while I try to dig myself out from under a load of work ... but I'm really, really pleased with this picture, and this character. I've uploaded the image at large size, and please do view it large and enjoy the detail, the nuance. I'm linking this character a lot. It's the same one you saw last month, the kind of "techno barbarian" I likened to a cross between Tyr Anasazi and Ronon Dex! Could be a science fiction hero, but this one is far from pulp, even though pulp SF does make use of the archetype.
It's Michael 4 wearing a face morph designed by me, and the Jerome skinmap by Tosca, and the Yannis Rasta hair. The costume is the M4 Bodysuit set to suede, and the Utilities boots and jacket ... but I changed out the textures on the bodysuit and jacket, and got busy with displacement maps. The magic of the piece is half in the rich texturing, and half in the lighting.
These are omni lights -- still playing with them, finding out how best to use them. They really do give a nice effect. They load up white, and the first thing I do is start playing with the colors. I have blue, orange, green and purple lights on this guy, to get this effect, and it's very, very nice.
Still slogging away with work, but I'd like to be back tomorrow with a couple more studies of this character, and perhaps a nice nude. I like what I'm seeing here a lot! Now he needs a name, right?
The background was painted in Photoshop, using about six layers of various grime, grunge and splatter brushes with various merge modes set for each brush.
Oh -- if you recall, I've been happily trying to crash Photoshop, since I get it last week. Well, I haven't managed to crash it so far, but I did find a way to slow it waaaaay down. Run two copies of DAZ Studio 3, plus Serif X3 with a very long document open, plus around 15 iterations of Irfanview, and have more than 10 images "open" in Photoshop at the same time, then load up a huge set of big brushes, and use them at about 2,000 pixels square. Yup, that slowed Photoshop way down! Golly, I wonder why?! All humor aside, I tip my hat to the gurus at Adobe, because Photoshop Elements 9 is so stable, even on Vista, and on a Lenovo PC, it's solid as a rock. Me like.
Jade, 5 July
