So this is something I’ve been doing for the last month or so.
Right after I posted this thread, I wondered what other things in Blender I should learn, so that I get to do stuff I really want to do, which is to create artwork. So yeah I thought, well let’s see. I can do 3D human modeling with all its texture and all, I can do both hair and cloth simulation also with all its texture and all, I can do 3D modeling in general, and I can do lighting and rendering.
And then it hit me quite suddenly, well, I guess that’s all I needed, and there’s nothing else preventing me to make a full scale artwork on my own. That’s when I hit the gas and a month later I got this.
For a disclosure, like many people, I’m a Tolkien fan. I think he’s a genius.
Sure the major story is great and all, but I’m particularly interested in the trivial story of it, or at least stories that could happen somewhere in between the major story lines.
One of the obvious and perfect subject is surely Galadriel. She has lived so long, and yet the major story lines only mention a little part of her. So that’s where I began.
Since the beginning, I gave the project the name of ‘Finding Galadriel’, and I’m using it to publish this piece of artwork. The reason is that it very much feels like finding someone. Sure there are Peter Jackson’s movies and the newly created series as a reference, but there are still a lot to figure out.
The first order of business is to figure out Galadriel’s Likeness. This was quite easy, because I relied heavily on both the movies and the series. I tried to capture the wise and calm look of Cate Blanchett, and the stern enthusiastic look of Morfydd Clark. And in the end, I ended up mixing the two.
Following the tradition of old, I started sculpting the face in profile. Not just for the sake of tradition though, it’s actually quite a fact that it’s easier to capture likeness from profile view.
To be honest I didn’t even take a render of her portrait from the front view at this point. But in case you’re wondering how it would look like.
The only thing I changed from both Cate Blanchett and Morfydd Clark is the eye color. Both of them have blue eyes, but I prefer grey eyes, because it is colder and seems to be fitting Galadriel a little better. Also, as I will point out later, it compliments better with her hair color.
Okay, second order of business: Galadriel’s Clothing. Both in the books and movies, Galadriel has always been portrayed being proud of wearing a white robe or gown. But unlike the movies where the robe is quite intricate with delicate design, I went for a simpler and older form of robe, which is basically a little more than a tunic. But to make it a little interesting, I styled the tunic to be very close to Ancient Greek’s chiton/peplos (still unsure of the difference), So I made it with Blender’s Cloth Simulation.
It’s basically just a cylinder touched by the magic of cloth simulation.
Move on, third order of business: Galadriel’s Hair. Since she has been bald all this time, it’s a good idea to add some hair this time. If there’s one thing about Galadriel that’s more important than anything else, it’s her hair.
In the Silmarillion, it is said that her hair is “golden like the hair of her father and of her foremother Indis, but richer and more radiant, for its gold is touched by some memory of the starlike silver of her mother; and the Eldar say that the light of the Two Trees, Laurelin and Telperion, has been snared in her tresses.”
Golden colored hair touched by silver color, what could be more interesting. But more importantly, how to make it in Blender? Lucky for us, there’s such a thing as the random slot on Curves Info node.
Connect it to a Map Range Node, with a value of Min 0.1 (for silver color), and a value of Max 0.5 (for golden color), then one would get something like this.
At this point, I came to the point where I knew that, even though I have done all the important bits of Galadriel, eventually I have to put all of them together in one piece. What is a better way to bind everything together than a good backstory?
That’s where the fourth order business came in: Concept. I started figuring out a tiny story that can show Galadriel in an interesting way. One concept came to my mind very quickly. The one thing that both the movies and the series got wrong about Galadriel is her stature. Those who have just seen the movies and the series would be shocked that Galadriel is actually standing at 193cm, 6’4", or if you’re a Dunedain, two rangas. I mean, that’s probably the problem is it? If height accuracy is to be followed, Gwendoline Christie would be the only one fitting to play the part.
Anyway, there’s one problem with visual representation of height though, you can’t really judge someone’s height when it’s in isolation. The cloth part you have seen earlier, actually has been scaled to the height of 193cm, but it doesn’t look like it, because it’s shown in isolation.
One way to fix that? Don’t make it in isolation.
So let’s pop in some other characters with normal heights in. Not only that it will make the height difference pointed out, it will also make the whole piece more interesting. I guess, it would be really boring if Galadriel is just standing there alone in the scene.
But before doing that, I need a bit of more robust visual concept. I pulled some old brushes in Photoshop and scribbled some concepts.
This was the first attempt, where there’s only Galadriel in. I put her on a soldier like attire: a full set of armor, sword, cape (this one I have to let go in the end) and all. I quite like the idea because I’d like to explore the younger version of Galadriel, like somewhere in Second Age before she eventually got Nenya, one of three rings of power for the elves.
And before she got the ring, though still immortal, she’s practically like any other normal elves whose immortality could be ended by a single very mortal stab to the chest. So whenever she went outside, she must have some sort of armor put on her. I consciously chose not to portray her becoming this ethereal, almost angelic, kind of being which can automatically repel all kinds of threats like the movies did. That would put me leaning more towards the realistic portrayal in the series.
It’s a great first concept, but it looked pretty rigid and not quite there yet. So I added three elf maidens in.
Instead of navel high shot which I used earlier, I decided on floor high shot, which exaggerated the height difference a little more, and put Galadriel in a little more statuesque position and pose. Coincidentally, when I put the elf maidens in, I got another potential difference to differentiate further Galadriel and her maidens: Attire.
I’ve decided earlier that Galadriel will use a set of armor and a sword. So once the elf maidens were in, it’s only natural to decide that her maidens (given that they are like thousands of years younger than Galadriel) will use some sort of more modern dresses with more delicate pattern and laces, very close resembling that is of period court dresses.
That will eventually put Galadriel, wearing a shiny set of armor, quite in contrast with her period-court-dress-wearing maidens.
That brings us to the fifth order of business: Galadriel’s New Attire.
The plan for Galadriel wearing a plain robe was pretty much down the drain by now because I’d have to incorporate a set of armor in. But eventually, I could salvage the lower part of the tunic, and made it into basically a pleated skirt.
However, unlike the original plan to make the skirt plain white, it seemed to me that it looked much more interesting when the skirt is infused with some sort of lacing and pattern. And to make it more fitting to Galadriel’s golden-silver theme, I added lace pattern with golden threads, on top of white cloth.
As for the armor, I took the artistic liberty to recreate the armor from scratch and based it from the concept I’ve created earlier. I know that I have the movies and the series to get inspiration from, but I pretty much liked the idea of figuring it out myself, because it has to fit Galadriel 3D model I already have eventually.
After some armor shape research, and a bit of modeling, this is what I came up with.
I know that the 2D design is a bit of a shame, really. That’s as far as I can go when it comes to the armor design, because I know that however great the design is, I’ll have to match it to the 3D model. As you can see, I eventually have to cut the lower third partition of the abs part, and then merge the first to the breast part, because apparently I needed more than expected to contain her breasts in the armor.
As for the final 3D model, it looked great overall, and its shape fits the sketch and concept I’ve created earlier. Continuing the golden-silver theme of Galadriel, I put the golden color on the body of the armor, while the silver color reserved for the rim area of the armor.
Now let’s move on to the sixth order of business: Elf Maidens.
I have to redo all the things I did for Galadriel to create the elf maidens. But the thing is, I also realized that these elf maidens will be secondary characters, so I don’t really have to put too much details on them. So let’s meet the elf maidens.
As you can see, three of them look very much alike. In fact, the first and the second are exactly the same 3D model. However, I played with eye and hair color to give some illusion of variation. You’d also notice that the dresses are actually of the same shape with one another, which again with different colors. Not only that, they also use the same lace pattern with that is of Galadriel’s.
However, the hard part of the dresses is not its shaders, but rather on its simulation. Which is our seventh order of business: Posing and Cloth Simulation.
The concept I have created earlier is very useful to determine the general sense of space and relationship between Galadriel and her maidens.
But when it comes to actually posing it in 3D space, I figured it’s useful to have an orthographic plan of how the poses should look like.
Once the planning was done, it’s posing time. That’s when we moved on to the cloth simulation bit.
The great thing about Blender’s Cloth Simulation is that you don’t have to do a lot of things to make it work. Once it’s properly set up, you can just run it and it will bear excellent result with all the cloth folds you’ll ever need.
There’s one downside though: it’s killing performance. I’d very much like to render the animation of the 3 simultaneous cloth simulations, but it will literally blow my PC into pieces. I’m working on rendering through a render farm, but I’m still encountering problems with the baking stuff. So the animation will still have to wait.
So to combine two things at once, I’ll leave you with 2 still renders of the dresses: the first is when they’re at rest pose, while the second is after I finished posing the elf maiden rigs into their poses and positions (which then the dresses followed with their simulation).
Next, the eight and last order of business: the sword and the crown.
To be honest, I’m not a hard surface guy. I’m not really good at it, so excuse me if it’s not as of good quality as the rest.
The first hard surface I had to make is actually the sword, and I did it the last just before the crown. I know that the armor seems like a hard surface, but it’s actually closer to organic modeling. For the sword, there’s no 2D design whatsoever, and this is as far as I could go.
And as for the crown, actually I didn’t really plan to have it. You won’t find any crown in both the concepts and the sketches. It was a very last call. The crown served two functions: first, it’s to further differentiate Galadriel and her maidens. Second, it’s a practical thing to have, because if she’s wearing an armor, then she’s going somewhere, and the crown serves quite like a headband.
For its design, I didn’t really do much. Because I know that most of it is going to be hidden beneath that gorgeous hair. So the hair does most of the trick anyway. I just had to put some shiny gemstone in the middle of it to create a bit of contrast, and voila.
Let’s meet the final stage of Galadriel’s portrait, with her shining crown and armor.
Put all these eight orders of business together and eventually I get the final piece, and I’m satisfied with the things I can achieve when I stack these small good things together.
However, there’s a small stick to the whole thing. Some eagle-eyed Tolkien fans will point out that Tolkien intended the armor fashion of Middle Earth reflects to that is of early medieval Europe, which is chain mail based, and not plate based (which was fully used only at late medieval Europe). It’s the one of two things I haven’t managed to accomplish (the other being Galadriel’s ‘Amazon disposition and bound up her hair as a crown when taking part in athletic feats’).
Chain mail is quite easy to make when it’s posed in a static position. But it can get quite difficult to make faithfully when applied to moving rigs.
However, in the middle of my armor research, I figured one information that’s maybe a good loophole to justify Galadriel’s plate based armor.
It’s quite funny actually, because the thing was, chain mails are not only hard to make in Blender, but actually in real life as well. Even today, I would 10 out of 10 pick hammering a plate of steel thousands of times than making thousands of tiny rings and chain one to another, one by one.
That’s the reason why in Roman era, even in the older Ancient Greek era, plate based armor was actually the norm. They couldn’t make chain mails yet.
Even in the books, Tolkien often pointed out that the ability to create chain mails, which are mostly attributed to the dwarven kingdoms, are the pinnacle of advanced metal forging skills.
So it’s not so far to imagine that Galadriel, being one of a few beings that have been there at the time of the first rising and setting of the sun and the moon, may come from a time where the idea, leave alone the mastery, of chain mails have not yet existed. And this relic of the past, she brought it along with her to the present.
And for me, it’s a pretty beautiful loophole. And for that, and to complete the visual story, I managed to create a bit of textual story, or at least a snippet of it. Never have I imagined that I’m going to write a Tolkien’s fan fiction. So here it is.
Now I guess that’s all for my latest artwork, and its long breakdown. I hope you enjoy it. And if you’d like, let me know what you think of it.