Making Of 'Having A Meal: A Conversation With God'

Introduction

Hi, my name is Andrzej Kuziola and I would like to show you how I created my "Having A Meal: A Conversation with God" illustration.

It is constructed as a puzzle; different ideas, different inspirations and experiences (some of them very personal) came into one piece. I find it more interesting myself when there is more than one way of seeing things and illustrations are more complex, and so as with most of my illustrations, this one is open for interpretation.

But there is one leading motif: double-faced people pretending to be good, but really using their power to harm others. Because things like this happen all over the world I wanted it to look universal, not connected with any particular culture.

Process

For the girl I re-used my old base model, which I adjusted inside ZBrush with the Move brush and posed with the Transpose tool (Fig.01).

Fig. 01

Fig. 01

I changed the shape and proportions of the face features to achieve the desired look (Fig.02).

Fig. 02

Fig. 02

The clothes were created with the Retopology tool and then modified with the Clay, Clay Tubes, Move and Standard brushes (Fig.03).

Fig. 03

Fig. 03

For the steak I used two very handy, new tools in ZBrush 4 - Shadowbox and Spotlight. (Fig.04). I was going to experiment with colors and textures later in Photoshop, so the steak was the only textured part inside ZBrush (Fig.05).

Fig. 04

Fig. 04

Fig. 05

Fig. 05

The image was rendered with another new ZBrush feature, Best-Preview Render, in a few different passes such Ambient Occlusion, Shadows, SSS, Specular highlights etc (Fig.06).

All the passes were composed in Photoshop.

Fig. 06

Fig. 06

I set the AO layer to Multiply mode and Shadow in Screen mode and then started to experiment with different color schemes by painting different colors below the composed layers (Fig.07).

Fig. 07

Fig. 07

Using my custom brushes I added textures to the clothes, painted makeup and added some more colors to achieve a translucent, porcelain-like look. Painting in Soft Light, Overlay and Color Dodge helped me here (Fig.08).

Fig. 08

Fig. 08

I wanted the background to look like Arabic ornaments, which I find amazing. Additionally I wanted hidden messages here, so I started playing with the words prey and pray and then connected them together. The worlds are barely visible in the web of ornaments now (Fig.09).

Fig. 09

Fig. 09

To finish up, I added some more final adjustments with Levels, Hue/Saturation and Color Balance adjustment layers (Fig.10).

And here's the final image (Fig.11).

Fig. 10

Fig. 10

Fig.11

Exploring the new, awesome tools in ZBrush 4 during the creation process was great fun for me. Many thanks to the 3DTotal team for giving me the opportunity to share this image with you. Thanks for reading!

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