Portrait with Flowers — hyperreal portrait with botanical crown.
A young woman in period costume — polka dot scarf, off-shoulder blouse — under a crown of chrysanthemums, dahlias and hydrangeas. I gave the flowers the same anatomical attention as the face, which is really the whole point of the piece. Personal work, sculpted in ZBrush and rendered in Blender Cycles.
- Hyperrealistic portrait · 2023
- ZBrush · Blender Cycles
- Hand-sculpted botanical crown
Every petal, one at a time
Each flower is sculpted individually, petal by petal, with the variation real flowers have — curl, damage, translucency. The chrysanthemums were the hard part. I needed a subdivision workflow that could hold the macro read of the whole crown and still resolve a single petal's curl in the same scene.
Skin, SSS and that blue sky
The skin came out of a Textures XYZ workflow for pore-level detail, with multi-layer SSS in Blender Cycles calibrated for hard directional daylight. The plain blue sky is doing work — it leaves nothing to compete with the warm skin, the jewel flower colours, and the graphic snap of the polka dots.
From blocking to final
The clay progression passes are in the gallery for anyone who wants the sculpt without shading — blocking through to the final pre-render model. Form comes first; a render only ever confirms what the clay already got right.
Project gallery
More views, clay renders and material passes.
