I'm Back!
I'm certain that all of you have missed my updates with progress and such, all zero of you must be gripping your arm chairs with anticipation to find out where I've been the past 4 years. No? Yeah fair enough, I'll be honest, I've been stuck working hospitality the whole time, which really changes you as a person for the better (a lie) and improves your quality of life exponentially (a second lie).
Alongside losing my soul for 4 years, the perfectly well sought out and usable copy of Z-Brush I had been practising with decided it no longer wished to participate in my shenanigans and went on it's merry way to the great software graveyard in the sky (recycle bin). This however has not stopped my creative side by any means, as I've taken any opportunity I've been able to to prove myself in my artistic ways. For example, during my stint as manager of the local pub for 2 and half years, I was told off multiple times for doodling unusually scary looking characters and creatures and hiding them around the pub for people to find. Apparently that didn't match the 'family friendly local' vibe we were going for, which quite frankly told me everything I needed to know about how dull the world outside of the creative field truly is. Anyway, enough about the time I spent in purgatory for my sins. A lot of time passed that left me longing to start sculpting again, but without shelling out money for a license for Z-Brush, I had no option but to try and learn Blender, which unfortunately was an utter disaster that left me a little bit defeated, and worried about how I might get back into what I wanted to do with my life. Eventually I decided to bite the bullet and pay for a yearly subscription to Z-Brush, which meant I not only got to start back up again with character creation and portfolio work, I got to do it in a constantly updated and funky fresh version of the software I'd spent the better part of 3 years working in!
Because It'd had been a while since my last sculpt, I thought it best to start a new straight back to a strong anatomy focused study, this led to the idea of doing a human skull, which took a whole lot of time due to trying to fit it in and around work. Eventually I left the pub I worked at (whole mess of a story), and went into a small café / wine bar, whose owner wanted me to run it. The hours here fit perfectly for me to work on my portfolio, albeit at a heavy impact to the pay-check due to reduced hours (55 per week to maximum of 30), but I have been able to sculpt again, so my mind is somewhat at ease. With these new reduced hours, I've been able to put a lot of my free time into sculpting and re-applying to internships throughout the industry (why nobody wanted to hire someone with a portfolio that hasn't been updated in 4 years is quite frankly beyond me). I took a lot of time and care with the skull, allowing myself to relearn what I'd forgotten in terms of the software, and to investigate and understand the changes that had been implemented within Z-Brush since my last use. I had taken the skull when I reached a point of moderate completeness and posted it onto Reddit with the full intent to be ripped to shreds with brutal feedback (this is what I'd asked people to do in order to gain a further understanding of what needed to be focused on more, and to maybe see if I had missed any techniques along the way). To my surprise, the feedback was entirely positive, some even stating that it's one of the few pieces posted on the subreddit that should be taken further and completed.
