Human Warrior Bust

This is the first time I got to sculpt a human. To be honest, one of the reasons I usually sculpt creatures is because it's easier. It is a lot of fun, and I do love the fantasy part, but a big part of the reason is simply that it's easier.

We know exactly how a human head is shaped and what correct anatomy looks like. We will notice a misplaced or out-of-shape feature in a minute, specifically on the face, which always gets our attention first. Monsters, on the other hand, have much more "fluid" anatomy. It still needs to make sense, but we don't need to explain it, and illogical anatomy is much less distinguishable.

An example that pops to mind is wings. We are all familiar with angels—or removing the mystical name, let's call them "winged humans." For a human to have wings to actually fly with, the wingspan would need to be about 8 meters. In common fantasy art, that is rarely the case, but we are much less likely to notice that breaking of physics and anatomy. Monsters and creatures are even easier; bone structure is very fluid, and even muscle tone can be slightly off (though I would claim that's less true, and we'd notice muscle mistakes a bit more).

Getting back to the subject, it is very difficult to create a human because of that need for correctness. As a side note, speaking of fantasy and humans: I have never gotten close to sculpting a female head or a feminine monster. Most of them rely on the human feminine head structure, which I have not succeeded in the times I have tried—but then again, it's basically a female or feminine human head.

So here, I got something that looked like a human male face. Even though the chin and face are a bit too long, I think it's decent.

Since I was on the road at the time, I decided to only make a bust, but to make detailed clothing. The helmet looked a bit worn, which I considered changing. That got me looking into World of Warcraft human gear references, but after spending way too much time not making a decision, I decided to just keep it as is and move on to the painting.