Raul! this is fantastic! It’s my favorite thing I’ve seen from you. I love it! I especially love the way you made the head slightly oversized. It is a nice stylistic twist that makes perfect sense here. I also like the worker’s arms you gave him, The conflict is very interesting. His head makes him look like an intellectual and his arms make him feel like some kind of blue collar worker who works a lot with his hands.
He could be a futuristic Thomas Edison :)

The modeling is the best part of this, which I know is the most important part on these forums, the face is half feminine and has a lot of character.
However, the rendering side is not so good, but in this sort of render I can never tell it’s just part of the concept, unfinished, or wrong.
His left arm is fatter that his right arm.
Why are his arms untextured compared to his face?
The lightbulb rendering needs more contrast in it, it’s not receiving the amount of light that’s in the rest of the scene.
The simple gradient background combined with the single light source, makes it look like cheap CG, since the only place that happens is in CG renders.
You have a great model and a nice idea, but I think you need to put more work into presenting it.

His left arm is fatter that his right arm.

That’s one of my favorite parts of this. Very few people have equal sized arms. Especially left-handed people. Many left handed people, like myself, are either ambidextrous or they only use one hand for everything. Quite naturally one arm can get very built up compared to the other. This also happens with extremely right-handed people. You can see extreme examples of this in tennis players for instance. When I was growing up it was quite common to see people with severely uneven arms and shoulders. But now in a day where everyone goes to a gym and uses artificial, mechanical weights to work out, it’s a lot less prevalent. Aside from people who are heavily into bodybuilding, the only time you ever see true symmetry in the arms is in most CG. I really hope Raul doesn’t change this little detail because it gives the character an element of a weakness and strength type of conflict that I find very interesting. I would even exaggerate this. But that is just me.

Funny, my brother’s father did everything with his right arm. As a result, he had a huge powerful right arm, and his left arm and shoulder were almost like a woman’s arm and shoulder. This was back in the 70’s and it was not uncommon in those days to see that so he didn’t look like a freak of nature.

The simple gradient background combined with the single light source, makes it look like cheap CG, since the only place that happens is in CG renders.

I’m curious as well about the untextured arms. Is it on purpose and done for stylistic reasons? Or have you just not gotten to that yet?

great work raul,very nicely done !! cool idea :D

That’s one of my favorite parts of this. Very few people have equal sized arms.

Come on, you keep doing this, and it annoys me. You keep seeing things in pieces and coming up with your own convoluted explanation as to why it’s there, and you always err on the side of giving credit to the artist for having a good idea, rather than assuming it’s an oversight or an error. As far as you’re concerned there’s no such thing as errors in art, everything has been planned and has a perfectly reasonable explanation.
What I do is point out flaws, and see if the artist can come up with an explanation for them.  I don’t provide one on his behalf. Mostly they don’t have an explanation, and it was just an error.

. When I was growing up it was quite common to see people with severely uneven arms and shoulders. But now in a day where everyone goes to a gym and uses artificial, mechanical weights to work out, it’s a lot less prevalent. Aside from people who are heavily into bodybuilding, the only time you ever see true symmetry in the arms is in most CG.

..and every figure sculpture ever made by every great artist who ever lived. I’d be interested to see one with such disparity it the arms, because I’ve never seen such a thing, in real life or otherwise.

and Rembrandt paintings.

Yes, the same general idea, but rather better than this. The problem with doing it in CG is that the gradient background has no texture, or the slight colour and tonal variations which make it interesting and part of the whole.  CG gradient backgrounds look bland and separated from the subject, it looks more like he’s standing in a big room filled with thick purple smog.

I’m curious as well about the untextured arms. Is it on purpose and done for stylistic reasons? Or have you just not gotten to that yet?

I surprised you haven’t thought of an explanation for that.
It’s obvious.
Obviously where he comes from, they are forced to wear shoulder length gloves at all times and never allowed to wear hats, so only the face gets tanned. I remember my sisters husband was like that, he came from some foreign place where they had just such a law.
Another well observed detail.

Hey Raul good work! it doesnt matter to me wether the limbs arent perfectly proportioned or the colour and textures even. I interpret this as being a more surrealist piece, but I must say it does still look a bit unfinished. The colours and textures of everything, especially the arms could get some more love :).
Do whatever pleases you with this piece, make it your own. You obviously have skill and talent and the way you use that and develop further is up to you.

Come on, you keep doing this, and it annoys me. You keep seeing things in pieces and coming up with your own convoluted explanation as to why it’s there, and you always err on the side of giving credit to the artist for having a good idea, rather than assuming it’s an oversight or an error. As far as you’re concerned there’s no such thing as errors in art, everything has been planned and has a perfectly reasonable explanation.
What I do is point out flaws, and see if the artist can come up with an explanation for them.  I don’t provide one on his behalf. Mostly they don’t have an explanation, and it was just an error.

sorry to jump in on this, but I think that your perception of art is too uptight.  Seems like you’re trying to create an artistic environment (for yourself, and expecting others to do the same) where every last detail is tightly controled.  A lot of the greatest pieces of art have a part which is tightly controled and that other part which is more accidental and happens through intuition.  Artists like Sargent, Rodin, Zorn.. and more recently Richard Schmid, come to mind.  Having academic art training myself, I am not a proponent of randomness in art.  But having both a sense of structure and order as well as expression through intuition and ‘improvisation’ (for lack of a better word) are important in the creation of any piece.

I have met some truly incredible artists who just can’t come up with these explanations for everything great that they do.  Many times they do it because it feels right (as a result of training, experience and taste).  Also, errors are an incredible part of any artwork.  Without them, art would be dry and without character.. as if a machine created them.

I absolutely love Raul’s idea of creating balance through use of asymetry in the figure.  From a graphic design standpoint it makes perfect sense and gives the figure movement.  Even though I see flaws in his piece (more related to values and color choices..I’d rather see the head painted more pale like the arms), this is a pretty good start.

As far as the background, I like having the gradient, again for visual movement, but right now it looks a bit too dark at the bottom, and the lowered arm jumps out a lot against it.  Another thing is that, for composition, all edges of the ‘canvas’ seem equally distant to the figure.. I’d try something where one of those distances is different, yet again to create movement in the piece.

’happy accidents’ are part of painting , yes, when you dab a brush down and it just somehow looks right, but not part of sculpture. Sculpture is a slow, deliberate, precise and heavily planned task, requiring you to constantly think technically. Happy accidents don’t happen. You have to continually work and shape everything to your deliberate will.
To suggest you could somehow subliminally sculpt one arm a lot bigger and more muscular than the other without thinking about, or noticing it, is ridiculous. Either it was a deliberate plan, or it was sloppy.
I don’t like to judge which one of those it was, I like to leave that to the artist to explain.
Critics can make themselves look like serious fools by coming up with pretentious artsy explanations as to why something is the way it is, and then it turns out to be for totally mundane or erroneous reasons.

i thank you all for the complex replies, i agree an appreciate every last one and think that u guys pretty much pinned down all the issues of this work. unfortunately i am pressed by a lot of work and wont be able to respond broadly.

in short, yes the hands are asymetrical because this character was made piece by piece, it extends spontaneously(as u can see the suit and face are asymetrical as well, so the hands are in context imo). they are white because i want to somehow make a transition from flesh to that white material but havent figured out how yet. the lighting and colors are a bit crappy, i agree. ariel, i totally agree on the color of the face, that was going to be my final intention. the suit was made with max. i first made the lowrez in xsi and then imported to max and used the create shape from selection to get all the wires.

i dont like lingering on how i say something, but what that something says. so you can understand why some parts of the character may seem underworked, asymetrical, sloppy etc.

thx a lot guys. updates in a few days; i’m having some trouble at the university. ciao

create shape from selection? what’s that? Is that in max? do you mean renderable splines?…
Edit: :) never mind...stupid me:p ...I found it...I didn’t know that max has that option....:D I use polyboost to model in max and I have everything assigned to hotkeys..so I kind of overlooked max’s polymodeling rollout :)
Oh, and you can paint select and deselect like in modo and silo..Oh, that multi selection preview is a nice addition.

Andrei Cirdu