Male Sculpt

After being sad about the Mari competition (I can't even look at the posts anymore), I've decided to be constructive again.  I've been wanting to start a new ZBrush sculpt.  I haven't done a character sculpt since school almost 4 years ago.  I've definitely got cars, spaceships, and hard surface models down.  I've been wanting to expand my skills to include realistic characters.  I've been a fan of Scott Spencer's zbrush work since I saw him give a demo at Siggraph a few years back.  I picked up his newest book, "Digital Sculpting Human Anatomy".  After thumbing through it, I decided that I wanted to start a new male character.  I'm planning on doing a male figure muscle study, and then perhaps using that same mesh to create a stylized character.

After following my new book step by step, I feel that his method is a little advanced for someone who doesn't look through anatomy books all day.  It's been a few years since I took my nude drawing classes, and I sometimes forget which muscles flow together.  He uses muscle groups as reference for the scale of others, and after my initial rough sculpt, I took a look and could see huge flaws in my proportions.  I had to bring my mesh into Maya (I love goZ), re-proportion my character to image planes and other male models I've done in the past.  After getting that done, the muscle groups I sculpted in fit the model pretty well.  Step two will be to ZBrush out a scull, then into a face (not sure why people start with a scull, we don't start sculpting individual ribs or a spinal collumn when you start a character), but I will stick with the book.  Here's my WIP.