I’ve been getting back into 3D art lately, and I just finished an illustration called “Jetpack Johnny”:
It started out with a quick sketch I did in my Field Notes one day:
I liked the idea and wanted to develop it into a full piece, so I tried doing a vector art version in Illustrator but didn’t get very far. I also tried painting it in Photoshop and got some decent preliminary results, but just about then I was starting to play around with the Blender 2.5 test builds (speaking of which, they just released 2.5 alpha 0 today — 2.5 is a huge improvement over 2.49 and is so so so awesome, and I’m now going to breathe deeply and try to get over the giddies ;)). I’ve been using Blender for a while (ten years ago I wrote a not-very-good article on it for the Linux Journal, incidentally) but haven’t done much with it, and I wanted to change that.
At first I didn’t get very good results either, and I almost gave up, but for some reason I kept going…and going…and going. And through the process of iteration after iteration, it turned into the illustration you see above. Granted, I’m still relatively new at this and have a lot to learn, but I’m seeing improvement and that’s exciting. Here are ten drafts of the illustration, from first go to final version:
Yep, iteration rocks. And so does Blender. :)