100th Post!

Wow 100 posts! Not bad, and this one is a dosey!
It's no secret that I love Shadow of the Colossus, that game along with Ico have had such a huge influence on me artistically. I've wanted to create something in that style since I saw the first trailer way back in 2003



I STILL get chills watching it. No game since has instilled such a sense of wonder in me.
Anyway, enough waxing poetic.

Rather than just recreate one of the many amazing Colossi from the game I decided to create my own. I named him "The Slave King"
When I fist envisioned him I wanted to incorporate more of an environment into him. So I came up with a cloister that would be strapped to his back.

This is a project that I've been meaning to do for a few years now, and this is the initial concept from about 2008-2009 I think.
So I changed a few things, Obviously I don't have the tech that team ico had to render the fur. So I couldn't cover his whole body. I decided to just use alpha planes and it worked well enough.

The biggest step for me was the textures. Texture painting has always been a bit of a struggle for me. I enjoy it but I never felt I could really do my models justice with my textures. But on this project with a huge shout out to my buddy Jeremy Huxley. He helped me with some zbrush know how on the texture front (see the post "Texture Tedium"). Anyway I feel that this was a huge step in my skill set and I feel WAY more confident creating textures now.

Anyway, here is the finished piece. Like any artwork there are tons of things I am not happy about, but all in all I'm very proud of this one. I hope it does the source material justice.