Sculpting Project

Photoshop Design

Starting off with the new project, we had to design a sculpture of ourselves in both a physical version and a digital version. Although announcing our project there was a twist, that being that we had to create ourselves as zombies. Since we had 6 weeks to make a physical and digital, we started right away looking for research on zombies, mummies and anatomy structure.
I took many influences from mummies since they held a real feeling towards death and achieving my goal of creating a zombie, this would be a great help. Since mummies are so well preserved they give that feeling that a zombie would, decaying but still well preserved. 

After our research we had to manipulate photos of our self to look and give us ideas on our sculpting process. Having a front view, side view and 3 quarter view photo taken we used Photoshop to adjust and add pieces to create our self as zombies. 

 Starting off we had to insert our pictures into Photoshop and make sure our facial features lined up with one another. Using the guide lines I transformed and adjusted the individual photos so that the eyes, nose and lips lined up on each one. After this I placed them next to each other and adjusted the colour slightly so I had a colder skin tone to match the zombie feel.

 Since I had an idea in my head, I didn’t want to go with a typical zombie so I decided on removing my bottom jaw completely. Trying to figure this out and make sure it looked somewhat realistic and not over the top, I used the liquify tool and pushed my lower jaw upwards so that I could work with it. I wasn’t too worried on how it appeared since my plan was to have my tongue hanging down and would cover most of the disfiguration of the liquify.

Working on the front view I found a picture of a zombie that had their lower jaw missing and their tongue hanging loose. Using this I cropped and erased the picture so I could use the upper lip on my photo. I did this with the rest of the views, still using the same picture I warped the photo so it would rotate and not look so flat. Even doing this I lost some of the quality, so using a hard edge brush I zoomed in and went over the upper lip and teeth in detail. Making sure everything blended I used the eyedropper tool so that the colours were close enough and didn’t look like nothing matched. Once I done the teeth I realised that I didn’t like the tongue that I used before so I deleted it, planning to find another tongue to use later on in the process.

At this stage I was slightly worried on how I would add the tongue and make sure it looked somewhat realistic and worked in every angle. I ended up finding different tongues in different positions so this worked great. I again cropped the different tongues out and erased the edges so it looked sharp. Manipulating it and adjusting it with the transform tool, I placed the tongue in the right position. I had to adjust the saturation and brightness of the tongues so that they would match with my photos. After adding these I could then go over my drawing in more detail, blending the edges and adding more skin and blood to cover certain areas.

This is the final version of my zombie self and all in all it was quite easy to do. It didn’t take me that long and the process of it was fun. Towards the end I added different eyes to make my eyes look dead and I added different brush effects on my skin. I didn’t want to have it plain so adjusting my settings on my brush and changing the speckle; I went in with a blue colour and very lightly went over my photo. This gave my skin a thin look and with also adding veins this helped the effect quite a lot.