Creating Hand-Painted 3D Fan Art Of Chronos From Hades 2

Introduction

Hi! My name is Sara Kołodziejak, and I am currently working as a Junior 3D Character Artist in Virtual Alchemy studio located in Poland. I've always been passionate about making art. It started with drawing, and for a long time, I thought I'd become an illustrator, until I discovered ZBrush near the end of my Graphic Design studies. That moment completely shifted my focus, and I've been sculpting characters in 3D ever since.

I think that having a foundation in drawing has helped a lot with understanding anatomy, shapes, and color, core elements that carry over into 3D work. I'm especially drawn to stylized characters, bold silhouettes, and hand-painted textures, often inspired by the games and animated shows I grew up with. In this breakdown, I'll walk you through my process behind a hand-painted fan art of Chronos from Hades II.

Getting Started

This piece was created during a friendly challenge with fellow 3D character artists, where we each picked a character from Hades to recreate (and everyone did an amazing job, you can check out the full lineup on my socials!) I picked Chronos because he's totally outside the kind of characters I usually work on. Most of the time, I go for cute characters with soft shapes, and this guy is all about sharp angles and intensity. It felt like a great opportunity to push myself out of my comfort zone.

Plus, I just really love his design. He's the main villain, but he doesn't need heavy armor or flashy gear to show it. He's just standing there, bare-chested in a simple wrap, and still looks powerful and intimidating. That calm, almost bored posture stuck with me. His face is super controlled and unreadable. No warmth, no big expression. He feels like a mask of composure and elegance that's not entirely human.

I'm also obsessed with how the shiny gold details pop against his dark skin. The entire design fits perfectly for a cold, precise ruler of time. He doesn't have any crazy props or big visual effects. The whole feel of him is carried by his body. That meant the silhouette and the expression had to become my main focus in this project. I decided to keep this as a high-poly sculpt in ZBrush with only polypaint instead of making it a game-ready character. This time, I wanted to focus on the artistic side and use it as a study to level up my sculpting and painting skills. The in-game model is already great, so I aimed to bring his 2D portrait to life in 3D as closely as I could.

Modeling

I started with a blockout of the whole character, posed from the beginning. I later stretched his arms briefly to sculpt the base, but brought him back to the pose shortly after. His stance is fairly neutral and not very dynamic, so I wanted to make sure it looked strong and confident from every angle. That early posing helped me stay focused on the silhouette throughout the sculpt.

His in-game portrait only shows him from the waist up, but you can see his legs during gameplay. He appears super elongated with long limbs. That in-game model became very helpful. I used it as one of my main references, especially for proportions and overall vibe. My main goal with the pose was to give him presence: chest forward, one hand relaxed on his staff, and the other clenched behind his back.

For the parts visible in his portrait, I tried to overlay the illustration of him on top of my sculpt as often as possible. It wasn't that easy with his side view, since it had to be reinvented. Luckily, Chronos, being a control freak who, after taking over, decorates the area with statues and portraits of himself, so I had plenty of references scattered throughout his boss level. That helped a lot with figuring out his profile and hairstyle. Among in-game screenshots, I also gathered some references for stylized body shapes, gestures, and helpful anatomical resources.

I always feel stuck if I don't get the face right early on, so I spent a long time getting it to a place I liked. That was probably the most time-consuming part. I did several versions of the face and reworked it until I liked it, also tried different directions. Another tricky area was his chest, because it feels like he's almost sucking air in. I kept revisiting this part a lot. The rest of the sculpture was much more enjoyable. I focused on sharpening the shapes and keeping his form bold and clean.

Everything about him needed to feel intentional and composed. For sculpting sharp edges, I became best friends with the ClipCurve brush. It's great for clean cuts and sharpening up rounded shapes. Aside from that, the workflow was pretty standard: sculpting with ClayBuildUp (slightly edited by cranking up Roll Distance to get a much smoother surface, useful for angular, stylized characters like Chronos) and refining flat surfaces with HPolish. I worked symmetrically for as long as possible, but once I committed to the pose, I had to refine the arms individually.

Texturing

I didn't need proper UVs for this model since I wasn't planning to make it game-ready or render it outside of ZBrush. Simple polypaint was more than enough for my goals. That said, I still wanted to paint in 3DCoat, which meant I had to unwrap the model somehow, so I went with some quick and dirty UVs.

For that step, I handled each subtool separately. I'd first assign polygroups to split the mesh where I wanted UV seams, then use ZBrush's UV Master with the Polygroups option turned on. This did the job well enough, and if it didn't in some parts, I revisited it and fixed it with Control Painting to show ZBrush where to avoid seams. Once unwrapped, I decimated the subtools with Decimation Master, with the option keep UVs turned on, and exported them to 3DCoat for painting. That gave me the flexibility I needed while keeping the sculpt less heavy and not losing the details.

In 3DCoat, I did most of the texturing. I love how straightforward this software is for painting. I used a hard-edged brush and worked on each part layer by layer. The trick with this character is that he is all shadow, and light is what makes the forms appear. In the reference illustration, he has main light coming from the bottom and then strong rimlight coming from a halo around his head. I started with a dark base, and I was layering lighter values, and finished it off with black outlines and deeper shadows. I made sure to keep each layer of color separated, so I could easily go back to each for fixes.

Gold parts are what make this character stand out, and it's amazing how the artist behind the Chronos illustration managed to create gold with just 3 tones of colors. I recreated it by using an olive brown base, lighter olive for midtones, and muted yellow for highlights. And of course, black for the shadows.

After painting the main parts in 3DCoat, I moved back to ZBrush, where I adjusted some parts of the sculpt, as it was easier to spot some mistakes with textures on. In ZBrush, I also continued refining and painting some less detailed elements like his legs. To keep a consistent style, it was important to me to have my brush hard with max opacity, so in ZBrush, I cranked up RGB Intensity to the max (it's located in Brush Settings/Tablet Pressure), and I also set Focal Shift to -100.

Another challenge was how to approach the rim light that appears on the concept, which is a very important part of it. I wanted my sculpture to work from every angle, and when I tried to paint the rim light directly on the sides of the character, it surely didn't work as well as it was done in the original illustration. From an artist who goes by indiff4rence on X, I learnt how to create a custom outline that can be adjusted in thickness as you need. This very simple yet powerful trick added so much to my character.

Rendering

Since I didn't need any lighting information, I rendered everything in ZBrush. I used a material with no shadow information, which is great for showcasing vivid polypaint. Material I used for the character was Ren_AnimeWhite, created by Renaud Galand and available on his Gumroad.

For the outline (just the base color), I used the Fast Shader material with Ambient set to 100 and Diffuse set to 0 (Material > Modifiers). I doubled the document size and enabled Antialiased Half Size to get a smoother render, then turned off shadows in the Render Properties. After rendering several passes, I brought the images into Photoshop for final touchups: adjusting brightness, contrast, and adding a bit of sharpening.

Conclusion

The best part of this project was that it was made for a community challenge, where we all shared our progress along the way. It was inspiring to see how differently each artist approached their character. I learned a lot just by following their work.

At the beginning, I struggled a bit because I wasn't sure how I wanted to approach my Chronos. But once I got the high-poly to a point I was happy with, the rest came much more naturally. I just needed a clear direction.

I was also a bit intimidated by the Hades painting style. It's so different from what I'm used to: no soft transitions, instead bold color choices, and sharp shapes. But with some planning and careful layering, it turned out to be fun to work with. It was a great opportunity to step out of my comfort zone and try something new.

This was also my first time rendering a character in ZBrush, and I'm glad I gave it a shot; it's surprisingly effective for presenting hand-painted models. I'll keep exploring it in future projects.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read about my process, and thank you to Level 80 for the opportunity to share it!

Sara Kołodziejak, 3D Character Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine