Casio23: Thank you! This is created by hand, several faces (tri and/or quad polys) at a time, and built up (usually along the Y axis) and then manually “sculpted” and refined accordingly. It takes a while, and it’s a style I’ve been developing for several years now.
This style is influenced partly by mosaics, kaleidoscopes, and pieces of puzzles I enjoy working in it for a variety of reasons, including, perhaps most of all, that it runs, stylistically, somewhat outside of the 3D CG orthodoxy (e.g. manifold meshwork, etc.) and more typical 3D CG practices, which I still value and continue to work on in other pieces yet realize those methods are not the be-all-and-end-all of 3D art.
gnomestudios: Thank you for the feedback!
GraphiX: Thanks for commenting!
agentmilo: Thank you very much for the kind words!
I updated the top post with an alternate color render. I tend to prefer the monochromatic one, but I thought the second image might also be interesting to post here.
I agree with you about black and white. There is just something about the grayscale that color just can’t capture. How many man-hours do you think it took you to model this one by hand?