24 to 30 January 2016, your time has come.

I got another cortisone shot on Thursday for my subacromial bursitis and I’m resting my shoulder much more vigilantly this time. Learnt my lesson there.

I’ve been continuing with SculptJanuary throughout the week. Today’s sculpt topic is “Stone Troll” and today’s image is a base mesh I modelled so I don’t have to Blob or Snake Hook any extremities from a cube. Learnt my lesson there too!

All in all, SculptJanuary has been great. Over January I’ve racked up 70+ hours of challenging and educational practical experience. This last week has been the most educational week for SculptJanuary so far because of the Torso sculpt last Sunday. Even though my torso sculpt didn’t really turn out that well, doing an intensive review of the torso’s skeleton and muscles has helped my confidence a lot.

There’s been other benefits. Doing intensive daily work with only a couple of hours a day spare has helped to sharpen and streamline my approach. The sculpts often took me out of my creative comfort zone pretty hard, especially early in the month. I’ve cultivated the patience and mental vigilance required to stick with the approach of capturing all the big detail before working on smaller stuff. And working with a sense of urgency and learning how to use limited time to the best effect – that’s been a long time coming. And memorising the sculpting hotkeys, and knowing when to use which brush for what, and and and…

Of course there’s also been the sculptures themselves. It’s been fantastic doing more character design after being in story development with Gronky and Pointy so long. (How about that quoll earlier this week? That quoll was awesome. Was it as awesome as the chimera? Maybe even more awesome…)

The biggest disadvantage has been that it hasn’t left time for anything else, so there’s nothing to report on “A moment in the sun” this week. Also the intensive work on the tablet finally killed my Wacom stylus and I’ve been working on a little old Bamboo Fun until the new stylus arrives by post from over east. The Bamboo Fun has a smaller surface and a noticeably lower refresh rate but it’s better than nothing.

That’s it for this week. Comments are welcome as always. 🙂 Now I’m off to watch Caminandes 3 again!