Little forest devil

I'm really happy to share the final render of my creature, developed during the maquette module by @skyupacademy

The theme of the module was european's mythological creatures

My work is inspired by a folklore creature of the Veneto region, the so-called Salvanello (or Salbanello), an elf/goblin that was known to cause travelers lose their way

I've already had the idea of illustrating a character from the folklore of my region a few months before the course,  i searched for "salvanello" on the internet and I got one illustration in particular that caught my attention

I styled my character by mixing various character's features, and adding a stick with two twisted arrows, and a cut-out signpost

now with a 3 dimension model reference i started the digital sculpting on zbrush, i took more body references

I decided to make some changes to my sculpture to give the idea that my character is small I moved the sign to the background and scaled it up, replacing the object in his right hand with an axe

The most difficult part was probably making the shape and folds of the clothes look realistic.

a few days before the render deadline I decided to redo the hat because it looked poorly

I found a lot of references and using dynamic tool for simulating the clothes foldings and noise tool with alpha for the texture I managed to get a good result

i finalized the model adding detail collecting texture's references

The render stage also gave me a hard time, it was difficult to find suitable lighting references. i had to make several renders by changing camera position, lights and materials of the sculpture