Grim up North Heath

Tag: Girl with balloon

  • Blender part 11 – Banksy

    Blender part 11 – Banksy

    Now that I have Steve the orc, what can I do with him?

    Orc with Balloon

    One of the best-known British artists is Banksy. Best known, even if we don’t know who they are1. Most of the works attributed to Banksy are stencil-based, the work is in the preparation of the stencil, rather than the application of the paint which was done stealthily and quickly.

    Here, I’m redoing their ‘Girl with Balloon’, which first appeared on Waterloo Bridge in London in 2004.

    The original Girl with Balloon, on Waterloo Bridge, London. Photo by Dominic Robinson from Bristol, UK – Banksy Girl and Heart Balloon, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73570221

    Blender allows you to add a reference image to the work so that you can use guides to pose or build the model you’re making. This was used in a couple of the earlier lessons, building the spitfire and also the original modelling of Steve was done using an outline provided as part of the lesson plan.

    Adding a version of Girl with Balloon, I used this to get the pose of the orc similar to the original. Not exact – Steve has longer arms and I wanted the balloon to be a bit closer.

    Original image of Steve with the balloon. The wall behind has been lit to look a bit like a wall – Banksy’s work appeared on several walls around the world, one of them must have looked like this.

    Modelling the heart-shaped balloon was done by using a Webding heart as the base. Text in Blender is treated as an editable object with access to all the fonts you have on your computer. For the caffeine molecule mug design, I had used Berlin and Bauhaus fonts and added a bit of a curve to the text. Here, I coloured the heart and added a curve to the top surface so it would look a bit more balloon-like.

    For the trailing ribbons I used Grease Pencil to draw black lines. I’d used grease pencil before in the caffeine molecule, adding lines automatically. This time they were hand drawn.

    The cartoon effect I used on the caffeine molecule was repurposed to give a stencil look to the posed orc. Instead of using one colour for the light parts and another for dark, I just used black and white. Shading in black and white wasn’t difficult, but getting the lighting right so that the finished figure would look like a stencil and be recognisable as an orc took a bit of fiddling around.

    Stencil image of an orc letting go of a red heart-shaped balloon. Similar to Banksy's Girl with Balloon.
    Orc with Balloon. Final image of Steve with his balloon.

    And finally, a short video of the transition from live orc to stencil.

    The transition of Steve from rendered to stencilled in four seconds.

    Next up, Steve has a go at stand-up comedy.

    1. According to Wikipedia, his name is Robin Gunningham, he’s from Yate near Bristol. ↩︎