Welcome back my friends to another hopefully entertaining journey into the world of Cosmic-books.
This month, In My Opinion will peek into a region of time and space where only the truly adventurous dare to venture. We will explore a vast boundless landscape of unlimited possibilities filled with both untold excitement and unexpected terrors. A kingdom of riches and wonderment readily available for all to explore, yet few take advantage of.
A truly magical realm called the imagination.
Yeah sure we all have one you say but how many of us exist to perpetually gaze into the stars with dazzle and wonder. How many of us pride ourselves as being forever entangled in the vastness of our creative chaos allowing that free flow of energy to fill our reality with abandon and joy? Or are we really just skirting the perimeter of our reserved genius in order to maintain an indoctrinated form of imposed function.
Agatha Christie once said “All Children go to school and have all things arranged for them so that they are unable to produce their own ideas.”
Yeah but what choice do we have you say? We all need to pay the bills right, we can’t just walk around daydreaming all the time with our heads in the clouds, we’d starve! Without structure the world would indeed collapse and all we built would cease to exist! Yet doesn’t our civilization owe its very foundations to the act of our imagination?
How else did we come up with ideas such as the wheel or plumbing… Necessity is the mother of all invention you say? Where else did the foundation of need and purpose combine to place form to function resulting in the intention of creation but the imagination.
It is within the imagination that the wheel of time spins and atoms conspire creating beauty to the shadows yet illuminated with our inner light. While many in the world live harmoniously within the balance of imagination and reason, most live without the need to create their own ideas. I fear we as a collective have effectively shut ourselves off from the richness of potential that resides within the scope of our imagination.
The greatest inventions and achievements in history have all arisen from the minds of those who while well educated were still imaginative enough to chase frogs through the ponds of wonder. Those in history who could bridge that gap between what could be and the impossible exceeded all expectations and through the sheer force of their imagination alone changed the world.
Albert Einstein said the true measure of intelligence is the imagination.
A recent study showed that the majority of genius level individuals were under 5 years of age and once they began school those numbers dropped significantly.
Education, while a crucial and invaluable commodity, is only but one aspect of a holistic society. Today it seems our connection to imagination is growing thinner as the vice of corporate indoctrination, our education system and technology continue to squeeze our collective focus. The tighter the grip of conformity takes hold on our imagination and it begins to mirror an ice cream vending machine that only sells three boring flavors.
Now with the creation of AI, I fear this will only get worse.
This is why I greatly admire those among us who still aspire to break the bounds of mediocrity and not only strive to grow as individuals through acts of pure imagination they attempt to inspire others.
People like Danny Mac.
I first started following Danny Mac some time ago and purchased a couple of his internet tutorials on sculpting in 3d using Blender. I believe I actually re-did one course 3 times, the lessons in that series were that good. I find him an enjoyable fellow to follow and learn from. He encourages personal growth through acts of creation using not only the tools that are provided through technology but those that you inherently bring to the table via your imagination.
Danny Mac hasn’t forgotten how to use his imagination and it shows in his art and creativity, he is a great artist, teacher and a good role model.
Recently he started a sculpting challenge which you can find links for on Youtube or X, so I thought I would try it out. The challenge for July was some video game I have never heard of but a quick google search provided some clues. The premise of this challenge was to sculpt a stylized character from that video game and then post it with some hashtags with the prize being fame and glory.
I’ll admit I guess… I broke the rules on the challenge because technically after getting half way through this project I re-watched the initial video where you were supposed to sculpt the character from scratch. I simply didn’t have the patience to sculpt anything new but I did re-purpose the sculpted and retopologized bust I did for his tutorial series.
Repurposing model topology I did in the past should count as legit, right?
It certainly counts when having to use your imagination to solve another dozen creative problems as I quickly found out.
You see, the bust from the tutorial series character didn’t fit my vision for this challenge, I wanted something a little less cartoonish and closer to the reference character I chose from the game.
A character I felt was stylized to begin with tbh. So I took that bust topology and subdivided the mesh and ‘sculpted’ it closer to the reference image of the character I wanted to replicate.
This process is very simple and works great, re-working topology instead of re-sculpting from scratch. However after that I found the topology was really, really messed up. I ended up using a different model’s head topology as a guide and retopologized the bust yet again spending another 2-3 hours at it. When I had that finished I again repurposed an older low poly model I made long ago as the body because I had to completely change it anyway as I turned it into the new character.
The time spent on this character after that was about 3-5 hours of creation time making the details with another 2-3 for the weapon and 2 on the hair, so a little over 12 hours in total on the piece… conservatively. (another 4 to write this blog).
Perhaps I should have just sculpted it from scratch, still feels like I cheated using an old sculpt…
I hope it qualifies?
