For the first half of a semester, the assignment for digital art class, taught by Wyatt Nelson, was to find and recreate a sculpture or building in Blender. I found this piece by Manolo Valdés at the Opera Gallery in the Upper East Side. I chose to work from this piece because it appeared to have a mix of relatively easy shapes to start with, namely the head and the wooden boards, before giving way to more complex forms like the butterflies and wire.
To give myself a reference, but not a replica to work my hands from, I took a 3D scan using Polycam to get a rough "sketch." As expected, the base shapes were simple to implement from the provided cubes and spheres. As for the wires, with a little time and patience, I rudimentarily fabricated them by meticulously placing and blending dozens of cylinders together. Further, I simplified, to my professor's approval, their design by merely combining the wires wherever they intersected rather than figuring out how they twisted and turned around each other. The same sentiment extended to how I chose to leave the butterflies floating in midair, demonstrating my own creative liberty.
This being my first time working in Blender, I often found myself frustrated that I couldn't put my hands through the screen and sculpt in the way that I would think to do with my own hands - digital tools just don't always do what you expect them to. To add to that, I finally felt like I had a good reason to upgrade to a GPU with more VRAM as the fully textured model reliably crashed the software. On the other hand however, I saw Blender as a way to more organically create shapes compared to a program like Fusion 360.
