![\"Thumbnail\"](\"\/files\/2026-10\/brotherofsilence_thumb.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\nThis was one of those paints that looked pretty bad for quite a while before it all came together at the end. I tried something different this time, using high-contrast ink paints for the first time. After putting down some base colours, I used the inks to build up the colour and shading in the recesses, then went over everything with my usual drybrushing to get the details to pop.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
I wasn't really a fan of the inks. I'd hoped they'd be a quicker way of getting the main colours and shading down, but they took longer than expected and didn't feel like they saved me much time. I'm happy with where it ended up, though, especially once the highlights started bringing everything together.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
The copper was my usual metallic paint followed by green washes to give it that oxidised look. It fits nicely with the mottled green flesh and makes everything look suitably old and unpleasant.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
The orange jewel was probably the fiddliest bit. The paint was very thin, so it took a lot of layers to get it bright enough to stand out. I also painted some orange onto the surrounding shoulder and cloak to make it look like the jewel was casting a little light onto them.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
Pretty happy with the final result. Not sure I'll be reaching for the inks again any time soon, but it was good to try something different and get this one finished.<\/p>\r\n","image":{"filename":"2026-10\/p.jpg","path":"\/files\/2026-10\/p.jpg","media":"","thumbnail":"\/thumbs\/400\u00d7400\/2026-10\/p.jpg","fieldname":"image","alt":"","extra":[],"url":"https:\/\/www.blakerobinson.info\/files\/2026-10\/p.jpg","extension":"jpg","file":"2026-10\/p.jpg"},"video":[],"threedmodelpreview":{"filename":"","path":"","media":"","thumbnail":"","fieldname":"threedmodelpreview","alt":"","extra":[],"url":"","extension":""},"threedmodel":null,"commentboxurl":null,"instagramurl":null,"twitterurl":null,"hiderelated":false,"hidefrontpage":false},"taxonomyValues":{"categories":{"art":"art"},"tags":{"3dprinting":"3dprinting","painting":"Painting"}},"authorName":"Blake","extras":{"title":"Bestiarum's \"Brother of Silence\" bust","image":{"filename":"2026-10\/p.jpg","path":"\/files\/2026-10\/p.jpg","media":"","thumbnail":"\/thumbs\/400\u00d7400\/2026-10\/p.jpg","fieldname":"image","alt":"","extra":[],"url":"https:\/\/www.blakerobinson.info\/files\/2026-10\/p.jpg","extension":"jpg","file":"2026-10\/p.jpg"},"excerpt":"A print and paint of Bestiarum's 'Brother of Silence' bust. . Here's my painted version of Bestiarum's 'Brother of Silence' bust. More sickly green flesh, oxidised copper and a purple cloak, with a little orange jewel to break things up. This was one of those paints that looked\u2026","listFormat":"[Entry N\u00ba 151 - published] Bestiarum's \"Brother of Silence\" 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A model, print and paint of the Arkwhite &\u00a0Voss<\/p>\r\n","updates":null,"body":"
I have made a lot of niche little things at this point, but every so often a print comes along that feels like a little too obscure to have been worth the effort behind it. This one is a scene featuring Elias Arkwright and Celia Voss.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
They are characters from\u00a0the broader Gloom Theory world I have been building with Gloom Darkheart, which, at this stage, has grown from \"a weird music project with a spooky book\"\u00a0into a fairly alarming amount of lore, art, characters, rituals and objects that I keep getting urges to recreate in physical form.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
Some projects begin with a concept sketch. Some begin with a character sheet. This one began with a grainy sepia photograph from the pages of Mysterious Theories<\/em>, a paranormal investigation magazine from the 1970s that exists within the Gloom Theory universe.<\/p>\r\n\r\nThe image appears as part of an article titled The Strange Obsessions of Dr. Celia Voss<\/em>, which pieces together the story of Dr. Elias Arkwright, his mysterious death, and the increasingly troubling behaviour of his associate, Celia Voss. It is the sort of article that sits somewhere between investigative journalism, conspiracy theory and historical salvage work. Half document, half speculation.<\/p>\r\n\r\n![\"Thumbnail\"](\"\/files\/2026-06\/strange-sm.jpg\")
<\/p>\r\n\r\n
What appealed to me most was that this was not just \"make two characters\". It was really about translating a fragment of fictional history into an object. The print is based specifically on that photograph, not just on the characters in a general sense. I wanted it to feel like a preserved moment taken from the article itself, as though someone had lifted the image from the page and given it weight.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
That gave the piece a very particular direction. It did not need exaggerated action poses or a big action-scene base. It needed restraint. The awkward stillness of an archival photograph. Two figures standing together in a way that looks ordinary at first, but asks more questions when you think about the story and events behind it.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
Arkwright needed to feel composed and unreadable. There is something about his role in the article that suggests authority, but also distance. He is presented as brilliant, difficult to pin down\u00a0and surrounded by incomplete records. Voss, by contrast, carries much more tension. The article frames her as obsessive, brilliant in her own right\u00a0and increasingly impossible to separate from the work she inherited or continued. So even though the pose is rooted in an old still image, I wanted those personalities to come through in the sculpt.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
\r\nThe 3D Model<\/h4>\r\n\r\n
Usually I would start in 3ds max, but realistic people are something that I still find\u00a0quite difficult to build from scratch, especially with two characters involved. Rather than sculpting both figures from a blank sphere and reinventing the wheel, I started in Reallusion's Character Creator. That gave me a useful base for the faces and bodies, and let me rough out the general look of Arkwright and Voss without spending ages just getting to square one.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
![\"Thumbnail\"](\"\/files\/2026-06\/charcreator.jpg\")
<\/p>\r\n\r\n
I had to take liberties with the hair and clothes as I don't have a lot of purchases\u00a0in Character Creator. The aim wasn't to get 100% accurate at this point, just close enough. I used the \"Headshot\" magics, and then some\u00a0morphing and shaping tools to get a good base mesh to start with that I could take further in a better app. The main idea was to get the facial structures there.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
And then it was into ZBrush for a few hours of sculpting and ruining all the hard work Character Creator had done.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
To be fair, the meshes that Character Creator spits out are not particularly useful for high-poly printing,\u00a0I was always going to have to reshape them, subdivide and smooth quite a bit. To be less fair, I am also still pretty terrible at sculpting humans, so there was a definite point where \"refining the sculpt\" became \"slowly sanding off anything that made this person look like themselves.\"<\/p>\r\n\r\n
I think I did okay keeping Voss's features. The general face shape survived the process well enough that she still felt like the woman from the photograph. Arkwright was less lucky. After several rounds of pushing, smoothing, fixing and accidentally making things worse, he lost a bit of his look and became more of a \"man broadly adjacent to Elias Arkwright\" than a great likeness.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
![\"Thumbnail\"](\"\/files\/2026-06\/zbrush-sm.jpg\")
<\/p>\r\n\r\n
It's always a little bit hard to tell, because one aspect of 3D printing models is that you\u00a0have<\/em>\u00a0to overly exaggerate the features. Take the brow crease, or crows feet or dimples and multiply by 10, because when it comes to the print stage, they will always come out less detailed than they look in a 3D model.<\/p>\r\n\r\nThe hair at least gave me a bit of a shortcut. I brought in hair from a brush pack, then modified it to get something closer to the shapes in the original image. That saved me from having to build it all from scratch, while still letting me bash it into something that fit the characters properly. It might also actually be responsible for Arkwright's forehead being a little bit too big as I was rushing Zbrush at this stage.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
The bodies and clothes were another issue. Character Creator gave me a decent base to start from, but they turned out to just not sit right\u00a0and\u00a0were too low poly and 'game'y. In the end I bought some 3D scans of doctors from Epic's FAB, which turned out to be far more useful. I dragged those into ZBrush, painfully bent them into roughly the right poses from the photo\u00a0and then set about adding details (3D\u00a0scans tend to be more texture than mesh). It was a slightly cursed process\u00a0but it gave me much more convincing lab coats and body forms than I would have managed from scratch or from CC. It was particularly helpful that the scans had done more of the cloth-folds for me.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
With that complete, the base meshes were done. No need for textures on these ones as these models are being purely 3D printed.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
\r\nPreparing it to print<\/h4>\r\n\r\n
Once everything had been bullied into shape, iI brought them back\u00a0into 3ds Max to be prepared for printing. That is always the less glamorous part of the process, but it is the stage where the model stops being a digital mess I can keep fiddling with forever and starts becoming something that might actually survive being turned into resin.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
We're basically making everything more 'solid'. You can't print wafer-thin labcoats or\u00a0small mm long pocket-pens. You also can't have gaps within the model (for example, between the shirt and the lab coat). All of these have\u00a0to be filled in, 'boolean'ed (the act of merging two shapes together) or brough back into Zbrush and sculpt-fixed.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
Voss's hair suffered a little bit as it needed some extra mesh spaghetti so that it wouldn't just melt into a pool at the bottom of the vat. I had to dumb down and simplify Arkwright's hair a little too as it was too small and detailed.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
I decided to go for my Mars 5 to print these ones - it's a little bit quicker and the detail is finer than my Saturn 4. Annoyingly, I had to shrink them a little to get them to fit the print area, but I feel they still came out large enough. I organised them into three parts - the bodies, the heads and the stand.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
![\"Thumbnail\"](\"\/files\/2026-06\/print-sm.jpg\")
<\/p>\r\n\r\n
And then it was time for their fourteen hour journey out of the goop. Here it is squashed into seconds:<\/p>\r\n\r\n
![\"Thumbnail\"](\"\/files\/2026-10\/zombie.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n