Ophelia concept

Article / 25 June 2020

First blog post, yay.

Something I'd like to share but it doesn't quite fit in my main gallery so I decided to make a blog post, why the heck not!
So I have this character I made for Character Development class with amazing Andrea Adams
She's just sitting here all sad on my hard drive so maybe she'll feel better if she'll see some light, please welcome - Ophelia

For the class we had to pick a character from Shakespeare and visualize it. I picked Ophelia (duh) in a contemporary realistic setting as if she didn't drown (spoiler alert)
I made this mood-board and pitched my idea in class

and after mood-board was approved I gathered references for the project

And quickly made this sketch from combination of 3d, photos and drawing

Even though she didn't die, she's toying with water, it's attracts her.

Initially I wanted to give her expensive black fitted cardigan—her desire for warmth and comfort as well as symbol of status since she was close to the royal family and could afford expensive things, so her wardrobe looked like this

I used Zbrush and Marvelous Designer to quickly block-in initial idea in 3d

For her body I used Ultimate Female Basemesh from 3d Scan Store and modified proportions and anatomy to match my sketch.
(MATURE CONTENT AHEAD)

After discussing project with my instructor we decided to change the cardigan because it looked to casual and Instructor suggested giving her over-sized cardigan that maybe belonged to Hamlet. So I came up with this

I used Kurt Cobain's cardigan as reference to channel the mourning energy

My Marvelous Designer patterns looked like this:

I started testing concept in V-Ray to have better control over lighting and material representation

Somewhere around that time we also had a field trip to The FIDM Museum and I snapped some cool photos for reference and inspiration

Also we had a trip to the fabric and leather stores and got some swatches for material references

I scanned the black lace and veil piece, made it them tileable in Photoshop and used it as alpha for Ophelia's top and veil.

We used pieces of foam and pinned fabric swatches and pictures to have analog mood-board handy by our desks

I used XGen to create strands of mohair on the cardigan and by happy accident it had that mossy earthy look so I kept it rougher than initially planned. Here's the final result again

Which is not really final, it's actually just the beginning!

I'd love to come back and properly model the shit out of this concept! The class and experience was super-fun, Andrea made is such an amazing time and I'm forever grateful for that ❤

Let me know if you'd like me to post more stuff like that, I have a bunch of pieces that are not really the portfolio types but were still fun to create.

Thanks for reading!
~El.