Blender Artist Shares Experience Of Creating Daily Art For A Year

Introduction

Hi, my name is Clarence Carter III (or charmwife), and I'm a Blender Artist. I downloaded the app after mistaking it for editing software during the quarantine era because I wanted to learn how to edit videos. After doing like half of the donut tutorial, I deleted the app and didn't touch it again until about 3 years later, when I wanted to recreate a video of a 3D house that I saw on TikTok. After failing to do so, I followed the CG Fast Track sword tutorial and have been making Blender art since. I had about 20 art pieces before I started making the Everydays.

The Everydays Project

The Everydays was something I saw on Reddit from another 3D Artist, StupidGiant. It was a project that was completely foreign to me, and I thought it would be something that I would never be able to do myself. It was towards the end of January that I decided to try it out for myself, because why not, and I thought that maybe it would be a way to make my art better, and I was kinda right. When I first started, I made a ton of those distorted portraits because that was my Sustained Investigation for the AP Art class I was taking at the time, and I wanted a large pool of pieces that I could choose from to submit to my AP Portfolio at the end of the year.

After that, The Everydays was just something that was part of my daily routine. That being said, I don't really have an end goal in mind for the Everydays, but I do have bigger things planned for Blender that I'm working on on the side. I get inspiration from real-life events.

Challenges

I think my post-processing has improved so much since January. I've done so many styles like the painterly, snuff, glitch, crayon, poster, and my main. There have definitely been days when I've spent more time in After Effects than in Blender.

My biggest challenge has definitely been sticking with ideas I try to execute. A lot of times, I go into Blender hoping to make a very specific thing, and the idea just warps and warps and warps until the end product is something that isn't something that I'm really proud of. Sometimes that distortion does work out for the best, but I just wish that could be most of the time. My favorite pieces are:

Workflow

More recently, my workflow is just blocking out, detailing, texturing, rendering, and then After Effects. I use GlobalSkin and HumanGen/Daz for human models and Easy HDRI for environments. After rendering, I use After Effects to color correct and add post-processing effects.

I would like to tell everyone to stay true to themselves and to be original, and ignore anyone who doesn't like what you do.

Clarence Carter III, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford