Gargoyle  

Gargoyle

Recently, I wanted to stop my caliper from lying on the desk (it won't stay in the drawer, I tried several times) and made an Apollo style stand for it:

which worked absolutely well - but was also absolutely boring. I thought there must be more in life than angular forms so I started sculpting with ZBrush. As messing up proportions when sculpting humans quickly makes them look like eerie zombies, I thought I'd start learning ZBrush by designing a monster right away (anyway this is what ZBrush is made for). Searching for good ideas, I found the "Alien Gargoyle" Pete Lindsay http://www.stoneworksonline.co.uk/ sculpted in 1993 during a renovation of Paisley Abbey https://www.paisleyabbey.org.uk/ . Pete, as an "Alien" fan, designed this together with 11 more traditional gargoyles to replace the decayed ones on this medieval monastery.
Sculpting this turned out to be quite a challenge. ZBrush has a steep learning curve from the start even with more organic designs, but the mechanical structures added quite an extra challenge to a beginner. People say with ZBrush the sky is the limit - which is probably true, but they don't say how to get there... So here's a rendering:

For my first sculpt in ZBrush, I find this acceptable. Printing this thing turned to be much more difficult:

In addition to ZBrush dynamesh making a mess of all fine detail (I found out how to work around that later), printing without soluble support was rather messy and there's just too much detail for this printer to handle.