I’ve had this idea rolling around in my head for a while, thinking of how to make Francisco Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son” into something fun with Cookie Monster. I knew it would be a fun small project, but didn’t really see a desire to see it realized until the new hair system for Blender released and I felt motivated to play with it. Truthfully, I only used it for about half of the hair systems in the final image. I think that nodes are certainly the way to go development wise, but the drag and drop modifiers for Geometry Nodes hair that Blender has put out aren’t a replacement for the old hair system yet. The new hair system works quick and amazing for whole object coverage, which is what I used for frizzy hairs and small fuzz coverage. But for sculpted large detail hairs, I found it way easier to layer multiple of the old particle system. Using these together was great however, and I’m looking forward to more improvements to the new hair system that makes it easier to use.
Breakdown:
My lighting setup for this was simple, with a sun to capture the simple lighting of the original painting, and a point light to get some better shadows on the face. I used a flag out of frame to keep the crumbs in darkness as they were somewhat distracting when cast in the bright light.
While the goal was to match the original painting, I did try to do a “beefier” Cookie Monster at the start. However, the silhouette just got too muddled. Wanting to match the reference, I think the creepier out of proportion version was the right move for me
I did think about it, but scale wise in my sketch up it looked a little wonky. It made Cookie Monster look tiny! The giant chocolate chip cookie worked a bit better in this case, but if you want to see a cool (physical) model that did this theme, I really liked North of the Border’s take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1tOX_TOuUc
Here is the “Behind the Scenes” article for this intriguing artwork!
Do check out this article, written by the artist himself. It describes the step-by-step process of creating the artwork and provides insight into character-designing in Blender.
