I'm currently working on a sewing commission but taking some time in-between to practice Blender some more. Here are some head sculpts from imagination (inspired by my current interest in ancient history YouTube channels!) I'm really proud of them! Both took me about 3-4 hours each, and they are manifold for 3d printing!
When I'm done with my current commission I'm probably going to take a break and some of my own stuff before opening up some 3d bust commissions
Commissioned this from @homeboundmonsters, and colored by me!
This is his take on @anchasvtt 's (still part of her welcome back event) young So and Var.
According to him, skekSo is testing skekVar's loyalty by putting his sword against his neck. SkekVar will earn his General title from this. He knows So's just playing.
The colored version was made on a smaller res than the original, but I hope it's still good regardless!
After finishing my last commission, I've been commissioned to make a plush Necron from Warhammer. As is my way I've been doing my research so I can accurately capture the vibes. All that said, I've had some thoughts:
Necron and the Intimacy of the face
The key struggle of the Necron is that they feel they have been deprived of the intimacy of the mortal body. More and more, as our society shifts to online discourse and relationship building, we find ourselves meeting the Necron in their grief. Trapped in mechanical computronic bodies, the Necron find themselves unable to meet the material world on a one-to-one basis instead experiencing it through a vague melange of numbers and labels and annotations. This forms a barrier between them and the Real, and more importantly between them and each other. How do you form sincere relationships when your brain is immediately filled with annotated data on the person you have just met? They are essentially trapped with built-in Google Glasses (although those who are purchasing those Google Glasses don’t yet realise the burden they’re purchasing for themselves.)
The Necron’s detachment from the intimacy of the material is symbolised through their faces which are in-fact death masks. Death masks are sculpted approximations of the face of a dead individual, placed over their real face in order to mask the decay and visual estrangement from the individual by death. The death mask, however, is by its nature not a person’s face: it is a visual symbol of a face. The Necrons then are deprived of the intimacy of face-to-face communication, forever trapped behind this mask, this symbol of who they desired to be seen as, and so are unable to be seen and known for their true selves. There is intimacy in face-to-face contact, in baring your soul through your most minute expressions, and the Necrons, by having no ‘real’ face, are deprived of that intimacy and so of the ability to feel person-to-person connection as they once did.
This is a great analysis, but I think the death masks might have another meaning as well. I need to tag @metashard, for he knows more, but the necrons are borrowing a lot of aspects from the Egyptian culture. The fact that the death masks are so rigid and similar, it is because they were drawing the symbolic aspect of the face. They might be trying to represent the idealised face (the ka's likeness, which is extra sad, because they have no soul).
Yes, I was thinking something similar! They represent the Perfect You, the You you envisaged your soul being, unblighted by the mortal deficiencies. Only the Perfect You is not you and can never be because the identity exists firmly in what is created through a synthesis of the spirit and the body. They've trapped themselves behind masks that reveal only one aspect of themselves: this is who I wished I was in life and now I am him he is my prison
After finishing my last commission, I've been commissioned to make a plush Necron from Warhammer. As is my way I've been doing my research so I can accurately capture the vibes. All that said, I've had some thoughts:
Necron and the Intimacy of the face
The key struggle of the Necron is that they feel they have been deprived of the intimacy of the mortal body. More and more, as our society shifts to online discourse and relationship building, we find ourselves meeting the Necron in their grief. Trapped in mechanical computronic bodies, the Necron find themselves unable to meet the material world on a one-to-one basis instead experiencing it through a vague melange of numbers and labels and annotations. This forms a barrier between them and the Real, and more importantly between them and each other. How do you form sincere relationships when your brain is immediately filled with annotated data on the person you have just met? They are essentially trapped with built-in Google Glasses (although those who are purchasing those Google Glasses don’t yet realise the burden they’re purchasing for themselves.)
The Necron’s detachment from the intimacy of the material is symbolised through their faces which are in-fact death masks. Death masks are sculpted approximations of the face of a dead individual, placed over their real face in order to mask the decay and visual estrangement from the individual by death. The death mask, however, is by its nature not a person’s face: it is a visual symbol of a face. The Necrons then are deprived of the intimacy of face-to-face communication, forever trapped behind this mask, this symbol of who they desired to be seen as, and so are unable to be seen and known for their true selves. There is intimacy in face-to-face contact, in baring your soul through your most minute expressions, and the Necrons, by having no ‘real’ face, are deprived of that intimacy and so of the ability to feel person-to-person connection as they once did.
I commissioned him a few months back and he's finally fully done! He's beautiful and so detailed! Again I cannot recommend @homeboundmonsters enough, he always makes a perfect job with his plushies!
Here's a photoshot of So with all the details! He might be a plushie but he's still a meanie! XD
I'm back with a SkekSo the Emperor soft sculpt/plush!
I'm finally finished with the commission I've been quietly working on! If I was good at using social media I would have been posting updates on but sadly I'm not! Excited to see him parcelled up and shipped to his forever home!
Been off practicing on other things and now coming back to work on him remaking the body! When you 3d print you require things to be manifold; sculpting on z brush I was struggling to make things manifold so I have started rebuilding the body on blender. Once he's finished I will import him into a brush and finish texturing and detailing him. Wish me luck!
Struggling to formulate this but here it is anyway, a mini essay. This is a very abridged version of some ideas that have been percolating in my mind.
I think something not often discussed is the effect being born and raised in a prison would have on Javert’s understanding of affection and love. I think a lot of Javert’s confusion over his desire for Jean Valjean come from his early experiences and upbringing.
Javert’s desire for Jean Valjean is often expressed through violent imagery: tiger’s claws and teeth -leaping to bite; a spider catching a fly in its web; a cat toying with a mouse in its claws. Javert struggles to process desire as something that can be tender or intimate. He struggles with gentleness and affection. This can even be seen in how when he finally realises and recognises his own desire for Jean Valjean it is considered a form of destruction or forced change: claws being made to unclench, ice being melted; or as a form of submission: a dog submitting to a master. For Javert desire can only be expressed by violent taking or through complete submission of oneself to another. The roots of this can be found in his childhood.
We see the effect of prison on Jean Valjean: it takes a normal, loving family man and turns him into a man capable of murder, a man who interacts with society and processes his emotions through bouts of anger and violence. Javert has experienced what changed a grown man into a potential murderer in his most formative years. We know from his pre-suicide letter that Javert spent sometime in a woman’s prison witnessing the abuse of female prisoners who were given more space between bars most likely in order to facilitate sexual favours that would be coerced from them by guards. It is highly likely that during his developmental years he witnessed acts of sexual violence alongside acts of generalised violence. His small skull is associated, during the period Hugo was writing, with childhood neglect as it was caused by a baby being left too long lying on their back. This suggests that he lacked motherly attention or affection. Not to say that his mother did not love him, but it is highly likely that due to her circumstance she would not have been able to give him the input required. This was common for many children of the poor, but combined with growing up in a hostile environment surrounded by violence, sexual violence, and the removal of freedoms as a punishment for non-compliance we can begin to understand how Javert might grow up to associate violence with desire or love.
Javert’s natural submission to authority, his ability to disappear, his acute observational skills, his unwillingness to criticise those in power, the correlation he makes between destruction of identity (giving up his career and leaving into obscurity) and punishment can all be tracked to his experiences in childhood. Javert has spent his formative years living in fear, learning to make himself small and becoming hyper aware of what is around him at all times to avoid abuse. This has left him a damaged and vulnerable individual with no solid sense of internal security. He has never had love or stability, he has been deprived of affection, and has lived in an environment of constant physical and psychological abuse. We know from modern studies that these things quite literally change the brain anatomy of children growing up in these conditions. For a newborn baby the earliest form of love is being fed by their mother, and so food comes to be one of the earliest forms of comfort. Javert was no doubt seeing sex traded for food and for safety from physical violence, hence it would formulate in his mind not to equate to love or emotional intimacy but as a form of currency. Affection too, feigning love or preference, a tool for survival. How, in these conditions, can we expect him to develop into a psychosexually healthy individual? Hugo states that Javert is a virgin and, although we know Hugo did this because of his weird hang-up about virgin= good person, we can suppose that Javert’s virginity stems from a deep-seated trauma associated with his development within a sexually violent environment.
Then, as young adult, Javert moved to working in male prisons. In France, during the 1800’s, prisons had some of the highest rates of recorded homosexuality in the country and it is likely that all throughout his career as a prison guard Javert was witnessing acts of sexual violence, or acts of consensual but unlikely to be safe sodomy. As he went through puberty he would have been only interacting with male/male acts of sexual violence. Whatever he might have felt would have been confused with fear and awareness of the inherent danger that existed within male/male sexual relationships in prison. Male/male sexual desire, although legal in France by the time of Les Mis, was still something considered morally reprehensible and as belonging in the underbelly of French social life. When Javert desires Jean Valjean, he desires him through the framework of violence because he has spent a lifetime witnessing sex as an act of violence or as a framework through which power and control can be expressed. He wants to have power over Jean Valjean- that is to say arrest him- and at the same time experiences this strange conflicting but also correlating desire to possess and ‘devour’ ‘his convict.’
When he finally recognises his desire for what it is, and detaches it from his desire to arrest Jean Valjean, his desire transmutes itself into a desire to submit. This is because, for Javert, submission has been his norm: one must submit to authority in order to survive it. When he sought to destroy Jean Valjean, he was secure in his understanding of male/male desire, when he realises what he desires is something more tender- a dog licking the intruders hand- he finds himself adrift unable to process his feelings. How can male/male desire be tender? How can it be loving? How can it mean devotion and choosing to submit in the understanding that you will be safe and unharmed? This is outside of Javert’s psychological vocabulary. This is also why Javert cannot understand Valjean’s freeing of him at the barricade: authority means violence. Valjean has authority and chooses mercy. Javert has no previous experience with or understanding of love and so has no groundwork on which he can build. Valjean at least had familial love in his sister/mother figure, his father, and the love of his nieces and nephews, but how does one begin to approach loving another human being when they have lacked even that? Love is not a natural occurrence it is a learnt behaviour and one Javert has never been taught.
I think this is part of what I find so interesting about Javert, so often he is criticised for not living up to modern moral expectations and yet so little consideration is given to the traumatic circumstances that existed throughout his childhood and which formulated his rigid perspective of the world. How can one who has never experienced mercy be expected to know how to give it? How can one who has never been loved be able to offer it? Javert has lacked the basic structure of society and has learned to survive under tyrannical rule, that is not something so easily shucked off in adulthood. Despite leaving prison, prison never left Javert and it shapes every decision, every flaw and every fault he struggles with throughout his life.
Very much a WIP! I'm making a bust of Javert as practice in zbrush :) Hoping to print it as a little statue. Screenshots don't do him justice I promise!!
Have been drawing plenty but not posting too much because I've been too lazy! Have this portrait of my oc, he's an alien catboy turned cyborg. Yeah, he's got issues
WIP! I've been very quiet because I've been struggling and struggling on Zbrush and Blender 😭 But I feel like I got somewhere today so I'm sharing! Still some tidying to do before I cut joints in.
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