Ragnar Lothbrok

 Following the research and suggestions that I have been given from character artists in the industry, I decided to try my hand at a realism sculpt. The person I chose to create was Ragnar Lothbrok from the show Vikings.

I decided the most interesting appearance to choose would be Ragnar's final days, as he has the most wrinkles, scars and longest beard. I used front and side profiles of both young and old Ragnar and also of a beardless picture of the actor, Travis Fimmel. 
Once I had Fimmel's face as close as I could get, I then began to turn it into Ragnar with the addition of scars and aging. 

The initial blocking in was very difficult as I've never attempted to recreate another living person (or rather one portrayed by a living person) before. The block in face almost had me abandon the project as I felt that I wouldn't be able to pull this together and get it even remotely similar without at least weeks of working on it. One thing I found when making Fimmel's face, was the eyes and nose were particularly hard to get right, as well as the positioning of the ears, which I had to move and resize a bunch of times to get right.

Finally I had come to an agreeable look for the character, and added a few finer details. When I was creating the character it struck me that adding some asymmetry to the eyes and nose really brought the look closer to what I wanted. Without the beard on, the sculpt is as close as I could get to Travis Fimmel's clean shaven image mixed with the bald head, and aged look of Ragnar Lothbrok.

 

With the beard added using fibremesh, I feel like I have successfully created a close representation of Ragnar Lothbrok. As this is my first realism sculpt there is obviously room for improvement, which I shall continue to work on with another sculpt further down the line. In comparison to working with stylisation, I found this fun, yet challenging as I didn't have as much freedom to give the character interesting or exaggerated features, and had to follow the already set look of the character. 

I once again added some painting in ZBrush to add a little more life to the sculpt, however I feel I need more practice on painting for realism in order to get the look that I wanted to achieve. Overall I am happy with the finished look of Ragnar, but will continue to develop my realism further with more sculpts. I plan to try another character from the show next, Floki.