My mind wanders when I'm in the shower, and sometimes a fragment of a thought tricks me into thinking that I got a brilliant idea.
Before the water washes it away, I glide through the house, dripping soap, with shampoo running down my face and burning my eyes, to take notes on my sketchbook.
There, the new idea meets hundreds of others. They are all pretty bad and will never see the light of the day.
Occasionally one of these ideas lures me into taking action, and now—after eating up an obscene amount of my spare time—are on this page.
When everyone is a great runner, try learning to fly instead.
That was the thought looping in my head while creating this one. I like how it represents going against the crowd and failing when challenging yourself to try something new.
After finishing the main piece I thought to myself: Imagine if this was a forgoten game from the late '90s? So I modeled the old game cartridge.
Then I thought: Would it be cool to actually play the game?
Well, I actually did it, and you can play it here. I dare you to collect all 7 hidden carrots.
My brother is a fantastic artist. He created this character design and invited his followers to the famous #DrawThisInYourStyle challenge. His concept was so creative that it got me excited to try recreating it in 3D. It was a true challenge given my limited 3D skills, but very rewarding, and I've learned so many new tricks along the way.
Create your own digital toy art!
I've designed this set of blank models free for anyone to download, import into Procreate, and paint over to create your own characters.
I painted 9 of them myself and it's a ton of fun!
I've modeled a basic uppercase alphabet (plus numbers), and it's ready to be imported into Procreate. This way anyone with an iPad can quickly paint over the models surface to personalise 3D letters for any purpose. The set is available for free here.
This project celebrated my very first year learning 3D! Hurray!
The "36 Days of Type" is a social media challenge that invites designers, illustrators, and graphic artists to express their particular interpretation of the letters and numbers of the Latin alphabet for thirty-six consecutive days. It's a fantastic collective project to follow.
In 2020 I felt inspired and challenged to do it using my recently acquired and limited 3D skills. It's was a very experimental project.
It was great to let my creativity run free and explore the tool to see where it would lead me.
The important part is how many amazingly talented people I've found along the way and how much joy (and frustration) I had while doing it.
This project was my very first humanoid character in 3D.
One of the tricks that I was most excited to learn was putting decals on 3D models without having to UV-unwrap them. So I've designed a pack of stickers to place all over the model.
These stickers are a fun way to expand the character's universe by adding things such as fake company logos and warning signs. The joystick badge he got for his great dexterity with controllers. There's also a sticker of his favorite band, "The WormHoles", who plays sort of a punk-folk-cosmic-melodic-dubstep with a bit of Brazilian samba, but they are famous for their epic didgeridoo solos :D
Anyway...
I'm also including early drawings straight from my sketchbook.
While doodling on my sketchbook the other day, I've created some funny characters to represent modern anxieties we now face every day due to social media. Respectively they are the Social Validation Junkie, Doom Scrolling, Fomo, and the annoying I Have an Opinion About Everything.
It has been ages since the last time I painted something. So I've been waiting until my wife went to sleep to steal her iPad a little bit (Shush! Don't tell her!). I had this doodle sitting on my sketchbook and thought it would be fun to give it some colors :)
This character is from a Brazilian TV show I grew up watching called Castelo Rá-Tim-Bum. It was a massive hit back in the day.
Besides pushing my skills way out of my comfort zone, this personal project is very close to my heart, it brought me back to my childhood. A warm nostalgia cloud kept floating over me for weeks after completing it.
Not so long ago, I was casually scrolling through Instagram and happened to watch a video of a parrot doing cute and funny things. After that, the algorithm started bombarding me with similar videos, and I got obsessed watching them. I've noticed that all the videos had something in common: the same kind of parrot.
I shared some of these videos with my wife, and she told me that the bird species is called White Bellied Caique. Such lovely little creatures, you should check them out :D
I had tons of fun bringing this simple character from a tiny corner of my sketchbook to a final low poly render.
The scene has a clue as to why the bird got so big. Can you guess it? :D
Whoa! You've made it all the way here.
I hope you had a nice ride, and thanks for taking the time :)
