Introduction

Recap the last lesson. Ask the class - what can you remember about ZBrushCoreMini? What do the different tools do? Recap the mouse controls and the effects of the different tools, plus the strength and size sliders. 

Let’s look a bit more at the art form of sculpture. Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Wakefield is famous for its many interesting pieces, displaying work from a range of artists, but a home for many pieces from locally born sculptor Barbara Hepworth. 

Take a look at this short video from Canvas to get a feel of some of the things on display there, as they watch, ask the students to think about how the sculptures fit into their landscapes. Colours, materials, shapes, size, does it fit or is it designed to not fit and stand out? Which do you like and why?

 

 

You can also see some of the work on show in these images. 

 

Of course we’re not short of famous sculptures here in the north east as well! 

 

People create sculptures for many different reasons, sometimes in tribute of remembrance for people, sometimes just for decoration, to draw attention to an area or to make a statement.

In the next two lessons we’re going to be combining all the different skills we’ve learned over the last few lessons in this unit and combine both digital sculpture and photo editing to create a new sculpture for your school (or any other location if you prefer)!

Here’s a few examples:

 

 

 

Main task

The first step is to choose a location, this could be in front of your school or, if your location doesn’t lend itself well to that, choose a local place of interest or suitable place where a sculpture could go. Parks and roundabouts are popular! 

These images are taken from Google Street View. 

Go to Google Maps, find your location and drag and drop the Street View figure onto the road you want to use.

 

 

Make the screen as big as you can (F11 on most browsers will take you in and out of fullscreen mode) and take a screen capture of the image. Ideally, capture the middle part of the screen without the Street View tools in sight. 

The snipping tool in Windows is really useful for this as it lets you capture a selected part of the screen with a rectangular snip. Find out more about how to do this in different versions of Windows here. On a Mac pressing Cmd+Shift+4 will give you the same option to capture a region of your screen. 

Alternatively, if you have problems with that, just press the print screen key on your keyboard. The full screen image is captured onto the computer’s clipboard, then open a blank page in Publisher and paste the capture onto the page (Ctrl + V). When it appears use the crop tool to trim down the edges of the image that you don’t need. 

 

 

Then right-click on top of the image and choose Save as Picture, and choose where to save it to. This just saves the image and not the rest of the document page.

 

Here’s the trimmed down version.

 

 

Next, let’s create a beautiful sculpture for your location. Open ZBrushCoreMini and get creating! 

It could be a representation of a real person, creature, or object (for those wanting a challenge!) or something they were inspired by when looking at the example sculptures earlier, or just a fairly simple abstract shape. 

As our image is by the sea, here’s a statue we’re calling ‘The Diver’. 

 

 

Choose a colour and material for the statue that gives a good representations of metal or stone. THEN SAVE YOUR MODEL!

 

 

We are now going to save it again as an image file, ready for the next lesson. 

However, it’s really important that we position the model on their screen at the same angle/point of view as the camera position in the location photograph, or it’ll look strange when we edit it into the photo. The easiest way to achieve this is to shrink the ZBrushCoreMini window down and open the photo in another window so you can see them side by side.

Then imagine where you’d want to put your sculpture in the photo. Here we’re going to place it on the grass looking out to sea so we’ve rotated the model to be facing the right way and tried to make it parallel to the paths in the picture.

 

 

When you are happy with the position go to Export Image to save the image as a jpg or png file, without the tools and icons around it. 

 

 

 

Plenary 

Finish off the lesson by inviting the students to take a look at each others’ creations and allow some time for some feedback about any that particularly caught their eye and why. Ask the class:

• Has anyone made something especially original or interesting?
• Did you improve your modelling skills from last week?
• Which tool did you use the most?
• Did you forget about any tools?
• Did you make good use of the size and strength sliders?

 

Check everyone has saved their work as both a ZBrushCoreMini file and an image file, and that they know the location of the files so they can find them in the next lesson.