I went and participated in yet another art competition. This particular one had been held only once before and I had never heard of it. What was Retrogasm? It was awesome and pretty much ran off the love and nostalgia everybody had for the video games they grew up with.

My choice was the main character of a JRPG from the original Playstation console. Main characters / protagonists tend to not be my favourite, but for this one, I couldn′t go past the lovely Valkyrie, Battle Maiden etc… Lenneth from Valkyrie Profile. I knew this was going to be quite a task, given that the character is human (in appearance), wears armour and has a fair amount of detail work throughout. These are all the exact opposite of what I usually do, which puts it way out of my comfort zone. On top of that, a pile of work could basically fall into my lap at any given time (freelance life), but I like a challenge and decided that it would make a great learning piece whether I finished it before the deadline or not.

Needless to say, I did not manage to finish the piece in time. I really did learn a bunch throughout the process though and got to experiment with a few different techniques and approaches – particularly in ZBrush. I will be picking this project up again soon as work has quieted down for the time being.

As part of the competition rules, participants had to post regular WIPs of our entries. Here are a few main progress shots:

If you would like to see more and read my rambling about all the ups and downs, I have a progress thread at facebook.com/groups/RetrogasmArtCompetition/permalink/2106779266272755/.

And finally, I would like to give a big shout out to Troy and Layna of IHazToys ihaztoys.com for organising the comp and being awesome. For those of you who haven′t heard of it, the Retrogasm 2018 competition ran through April to mid–June for the second time. Basic rules were to create game–ready models of characters and vehicles from our beloved games of the past, 6^th Gen or earlier. This was loads of fun, a great community and I′d definitely love to participate in the next one.