Tea Time with the Hoodlums

My latest project for 3D Shading is to create/recreate a still life. As a fine artist, still lifes are somewhat of a passion of mine, especially when it comes to painting, so I was very excited when we got the assignment. I first began trying to recreate a still life created by Will Kemp, which can be found here. I was particularly drawn to his painting because of it's simple, yet compelling composition. As much as I wanted to do an overly grand and complex set up for this project, I managed to convince my self to keep the scope small so that I would be able to produce a higher quality piece overall.

Although I began copying the set up of Kemp's painting, it wasn't very long before I ended up changing the composition around altogether and even adding in my own objects. As a result, the only remaining similarity between my composition and Kemp's is the tea cup with lemon slice and spoon. However, I decided to go with a more dramatic downward angle.

I am far from done. I have a lot of work to do with the shaders and even have some things I still want to add into the scene. The texture for the tea cup is my own creation which I hand-drew in photoshop. I am very happy with it as it is my first time entirely hand drawing a tileable texture. Here's a small snippet of the whole thing.

Now that that's done and over with, I am super excited to share an update on my character, King! When I last posted about him, I mentioned that I had some issues and was forced to turn him in without getting to do everything I wanted with the textures. I had always been planning on returning to him and finishing him up, but it's extremely difficult to find time for extra projects when I've already got my hands full with class assignments. I finally found some time today, and got a good amount of work done, especially on his pants.

I pretty much finished his jeans,  I just need to touch up the bottom where it folds and lower the amount of fade near the bottom because it looks weird having a straight stripe. I gave him some adorable back pockets too, which you can't see in this shot, but I assure you they are there.

I spent a good portion of my time on the jeans, as I originally wanted to hand paint them entirely. But I just couldn't get the fading to look right so I ended up layering in actual photos of faded jeans and then altering them with my own brush strokes and so on.

Aside from the pants, I added a patch to the arm of his jacket and started layering some dirt onto the jacket as well. So far I'm very happy with the direction things are going, and can't wait to keep working on it!