The Thing revisited

I originally posted my Thing illo a couple of years back, but recently decided to give old Ben Grimm a bit of a makeover. Below is the new version.


Back when I created the original in 2004, I was very wary of making major changes to my 3D work in Photoshop as I thought it would lose some of it's realism and start looking...well, Photoshopped. Four years on I've become a bit less precious about older art, and have also used many different programs together, both 2d and 3d for other jobs, and know that they can be used well together. In the end it's all about the final result, making a job as good as possible no matter how many programs were used in the process.


So from the side-by side comparison above, the most major change you'll notice is his mouth. I was never completely sold on the way the left side seemed to smile. It didn't feel right for the overall expression. To make this change I used what for me is one of the most useful and timesaving tools in Photoshop, the Liquify filter. It lets you push and pull areas of the image with any brush size and degree of subtlety. It's great for making changes to one's artwork which would normally take many hours to redo. Also his brow and nose were adjusted with the Liquify tool as well.

Additional changes were made in the eye area, a new rock texture was overlayed, and a more convincing cigar smoke was created. Also the colour and shadows were adjusted as well.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. Let me know your thoughts.

Edit 9th August 2008- Thought I'd try my hand at a little bit of simple gif animation for my new forum avatar. Bit of a learning curve but it was fun.