I first began to think about how this module might be structured during the first Semester in 2019. In anticipation of the module, I spent a small amount of time during that period to familiarise myself with the layout and basic functions of ZBrush, using Ryan Kittleson’s ‘Essentials’ video. The weekend before my first tutorial I advanced a digital sculpture of a character I’d begun during that earlier session. This WIP was reasonably satisfactory and received well by a variety of people so I started the sessions feeling reasonably confident. I submitted a selection of ideas along with the rest of the group and chose to sculpt a concept character I’d created during another module or year or so before. After preparing a selection of material for reference I thought how I might update the costume a little without too much deviation from the original idea. Although, I was doing so in a completely unfamiliar medium and planning to sculpt the traditionally problematic subject of a smooth skinned young female adult, I felt I would be able to easily complete a figure to a standard to which I was familiar.

The sculpting didn’t start particularly well as I was at odds with the Zpheres plug in within the application which at the time seemed like a good way to initiate the figure. The tutor advised me that it wouldn’t be outside the rules to begin by using a primitive form made in Maya as a kind of Marquette, which I decided to adopt. There was a period of around a fortnight it seemed where I rounded off the very crude low poly Maya figure I’d made into and increasingly more natural looking form. The initial pass was little more than a softened version of the very angular low poly. Gradually, interchanging the use of the clay build up, crease and flatten brushes in both plus and minus modes in conjunction with the smooth and move brushes I refined the form to a satisfactory degree in some areas of the figure. Once the hands and other extremities were modelled to a ‘better than rough’ state I set them aside with a view to return to them when other parts were better established and moved on to the head. The point when access to University campus became restricted through flooding, which meant an increased reliance on my slower home laptop and inferior work area, coincided with an increased commitment to one other module in particular, advancement for a time slowed down. But I was still able to progress at home when needed, albeit at a slightly less effective rate, and there seemed much to be positive about from my initial work so I felt confident I could progress well with the model each time I resumed work on it, even when pandemic lock down kicked in and access to campus needed to be denied altogether.

To my shame the length of time spent on Zbrush sessions shortened as other seemingly more urgent study work, I felt less affinity for, took priority over the short term. I was feeling ever confident I could advance quickly with it again when I’d broken the back of other tasks, both study related and personal, even though I experienced less favourable results in some recent sessions with the project. When I threw myself into working on the figure exclusively over the period of almost a week a regrettable but familiar feeling returned to me. Generally, in my experience, as I think most would agree, throughout most areas life we tend to get the best results out of things we apply the most time and effort to. But in my case I find creative pursuits the only exception and for a period I hit a wall. Before I knew it even the additional time afforded by the lock down induced extension was going by and I started to feel pressured into settling for what I had before me and undertake the closing tasks.

So, how had it come to this?

How was it that the very thing that attracted me to the degree course in the first place and that, arguably, I had the most promise for concluded in an unsatisfactory manner. I considered that perhaps my early successes and the knowledge of my former career had lulled me into false sense of security? It would seem plausible to the casual onlooker but it’s unlike me to display that degree of confidence. I wouldn’t normally take something like that for granted having experienced the ‘plateau’. Even, the most accomplished artists describe periods where they’ve questioned their ability because of they weren’t always able to make every hour in studio, count when required. I’m reminded of a recently watched interview where the renowned Portrait Painter Tai Shan Schierenberg spoke of failing to capture a likeness and having to scrape back to canvas at the end of each day ready for the next, for a fortnight with some subjects and catching it within an hour with others. Even at my level, as a commercial artist where I’ve received fixed fees per sculpture and have occasionally lost money on some, the answer is to accept the rough with the smooth to a degree but also to actively build time savers in to the early stages to allow for difficulties later on in the project. It’s not always possible to compensate but you have to take your best guess.

You always hope for an Abraham Lincoln, but sometimes a Don Bradman is unavoidable.

So, I find it difficult to believe it’s just that either. I’m not going to talk too much about the consequences of the pandemic and being forced to rely solely on equipment that struggles to juggle larger files, although it’s true I would often have to give the CPU time to catch up to avoid crashes as the file steadily grew in size, often for up to twenty minutes and running video capture software simultaneously became an impossibility for the same reason. No, I believe my problems started before that and a question my tutor asked me during the tutorial at week 4 gives a clue as to what is at the root of my difficulty. He was referring to my suggestion of incorporating a likeness into the project which I had an easy answer for at the time by agreeing to cease pursuing it to the end if time were an issue. His question was "are you sure that it's manageable". I'd been a portrait sculptor and we were really talking about that single aspect so the answer was yes. But was I considering the rest of it?

Smooth skinned young adults in general are one of the hardest things in the real world to get right and everyone has an opinion about them because they are so very familiar. It takes a long time to even make a bad one and even longer to make a good one because there is less room for error compared to fantasy creatures, the odd bump in the wrong place isn’t a problem on a respectable swamp monster, it’s almost a virtue. But everyone on the planet knows what a perfect human specimen is supposed to look like, whether they’re an artist or not. Now, the same might be true for any creature in the real world to a lesser degree but never more so than a young man or a woman.

I had the perfect opportunity before me to ease myself into the world of high resolution 3D modelling by being invited to make a largely nonspecific wrinkly creature of my own design and instead I set myself up for likely disappointment, by over facing myself with a recognisably difficult subject. A wonderful thing to see when done correctly but notoriously time consuming to achieve well from scratch (not to mention harder to embellish impressively once sculpted).

The fact is, people that can do this are at the top of their game and I was unwise to think I could do what they do in a medium I know little about.

The technical challenges associated with the application we used are universal for all and I experienced and dealt with them as others did and are not relevant to the question of what I learnt from this experience and how I might have chosen to do things differently. The overwhelming lesson I take from this module is to avoid doing the very thing I was convinced I wouldn’t do, which is not to embark on attempting to learn a completely new complex set of tools and expect to be able to operate them at the highest level based on your knowledge of past achievement.