Recreating Barking Up the Wrong Turkey by Joseph Christian Leyendecker in ZBrush

Introduction 

Hello everyone! My name is Varya, and I’m in love with 3D. I want to share with you the process of creating fan art based on the work Barking up the Wrong Turkey by Joseph Christian Leyendecker.

A little about me. Since childhood, I have had a passion for creativity – I wanted to draw and create something. I graduated from art school but didn’t gain much knowledge there. Nevertheless, I wanted to connect my life with creativity, so I tried studying at an architecture college and the Academy of Arts. At the architecture college, we drew very little, which I didn’t like, and in the preparatory courses at the Academy of Arts, we drew too much. I wanted something in between, and I accidentally discovered CG. At that moment, I found my true passion! I really enjoy what I do, and even in my free time, I often sculpt for myself. I also love working with paints, so I sometimes still paint with oil paints.

It's interesting that from the time I was in art school until I discovered 3D graphics, I couldn't stand sculpting. But now, I sculpt every day with digital clay, and it brings me incredible pleasure!

Studying

I think this might be interesting for beginning artists. I studied with fire in my eyes! These courses helped me start learning:

• VideoSmile course on Blender (by Artem Slakva)
• VideoSmile course on Substance 3D Painter (by Alexander Kolyasa)

At that time, I still didn't understand in which specific direction I wanted to study, so I started with the basics. I want to say that Alexander Kolyasa forever instilled in me a love for creating textures and was a wonderful mentor.

Then I tried to sculpt a skull in ZBrush using one of the free short courses from XYZ (by Yuri Porubov, I think). Then everything became crystal clear to me – I want to make characters! That's why the following courses were focused on this:

• Victory3D – GameReady Character in Blender
• Kondratiki – Absolute ZBrush

I should say that the last course does not teach how to make characters or how to make them beautiful, but it explains the logic of ZBrush and makes you feel like a fish in water in the program! I definitely recommend it.

Now, whenever possible, I also try to learn, and during the process of working on Barking up the Wrong Turkey, the incomparable Aleksandr Ladosha helped me with feedback and moral spirit! At the high poly stage, I realized that I was stuck and wanted to get a fresh look.

I am very grateful to all the people mentioned for their courses – they helped me gain experience, thank you!

Now my team and I are working on Battles for Glory. The game has not been announced yet. There, I make characters and most often hand-paint textures. That's why when I decided to make the art, I wanted it to be hand-painted because at work, I do it all the time and don't show it on ArtStation.

Barking Up the Wrong Turkey

Frankly speaking, I just love the works of Joseph Christian Leyendecker, Norman Perceval Rockwell, Duane Bryers, and Gillette Elvgren. I admire many of their works, and each one is beautiful in its own way. The way their art interacts with composition, form, color, and light – damn beautiful. And have you seen how atmospheric and emotional they are?

In general, I realized that it's not enough to just love it – it’s time to do it!

It's hard to choose between the interesting plots of Joseph Christian Leyendecker and Norman Rockwell and the beautiful women of Duane Bryers and Gillette Elvgren. Any of their works would be exciting to create, but this time, the plot – namely Barking up the Wrong Turkey by Joseph Christian Leyendecker – was chosen.

Here, I did not want to go into technical details, especially since the work itself isn’t easy for me – it’s quite voluminous. Overall, it's a great opportunity to sculpt whatever my heart desires, work with composition and atmosphere, and draw hand painting.

Sculpting

In the works that I create for myself, I don’t use ready-made models – I start with primitives. This way, each piece turns out to be more unique, I think. During the process, I don’t spend much time on details that won’t be visible in the final result.

I started working with the boy's head. The goal was to capture the emotion as the author did while making it convincing in 3D since in the original, the guy has a rather caricatured expression. (No matter how hard I tried to recreate it in the mirror, I couldn't.)

The first approach looked like this – here, he is still a little baby.

I made this version of the face and stopped, everything will still change in the process.

Then I sketched out the body, pants, coat, cap, and boots – basically, everything that could be done with symmetry. The boots were made meticulously because a person is judged by their shoes. First, I created a high poly model and then did the retopology to ensure it would look good and correct with subdivisions. Here is an example of the finished retopology with one subdivision.

(If I had known I would be talking about the work, I would have taken better shots – I’ll keep that in mind for the future!)

I will add the folds on the clothes and detailing once I have placed the character in the pose and positioned the turkey in the boy's hands.

Now, the basket – one of my favorite objects in this scene!

For this, I prepared a base in Blender using Remesh so that when using Decimate, the diamonds would be the right size (based on the feeling). Once the diamonds were ready, I cut them into strips, duplicated them, and mirrored the entire object, as two bases were needed to create the weave.

With Blender done, I moved the basket to ZBrush, divided the polygons, and used a Standard brush (about the size of a diamond) to press and squeeze the weaving – first on one part of the basket, then on the other. I added thickness, created the handle and pins, and that’s it! Here my basket already has celery.

I made a gift and added garlic and eggs to the basket. They are not visible in the render, but now you know they are there.

Now, the dogs... This is where I really regret not taking screenshots. I made a base (roughly speaking, a naked dog), then I started sculpting the fur directly on the same mesh, and that was my mistake.

The idea was to make one dog completely and then create the others from it, putting them in different poses. Well, the dogs were already standing in their places, posed and with emotions, but the fur... looked like a hack job. So, I ended up shaving all the dogs, then corrected the anatomy (which I had managed to ruin with that first unsuccessful fur) and made the fur for each dog separately and without symmetry. Don't repeat my mistakes! It took a long time.

In general, I mean that doing the same thing many times improves your skill in the process. At the final stage of sculpting and texturing, I made the third dog and named her Dashka. I like her more than the others, and it is on her that I will show how everything looks.

Fur

This time, to avoid ruining the anatomy with fur, I duplicated the dog and sculpted the fur on the duplicate. Once I was satisfied with the result, I combined them into a single geometry. For the fur sculpting, I mainly used SnakeHook with different alphas, Move with AccuCurve, Slash2, and other brushes.

Topology & UVs

I didn't need perfect topology here – this is art for the soul – so ZRemesher and UV mapping in ZBrush were enough.

ZRemesher created an acceptable topology, then I started adding divides and transferring high poly detailing using Project. Once the detailing quality was satisfactory (I had four divides), I switched to the first divide and unwrapped the model on a clone using UV Master. Now, we have a dog with UVs and several levels of detailing. The low poly goes to Substance 3D Painter, and the high poly to Marmoset Toolbag 4.

All other objects in the scene received UVs in the same way. Yes, the UVs aren't perfect, but they will do for my purposes.

Texturing

Fur Texture

I did hand-painting in Substance 3D Painter. Unfortunately, I have already deleted the texture file, but I will try to explain using what I have.

I baked all the necessary maps for the generators to work and immediately started working in Base Color mode. I filled the Fill Layer with one general average color and then added Fill Layers with generators for the corresponding colors:

• World Space Normals (inverted for shadows)
• Light
• Ambient Occlusion
• Curvature (if necessary)

My base for hand-painting usually consists of this set.

Then I added Fill Layer + Black Mask + Paint [1]. In this layer, I used a hard brush and a contrasting color (to make it easier to see) to highlight the strands with strokes. From there, I copied the mask and pasted it into a new Layer [2]. Now I could safely paint within the mask without worrying about the shape of the stroke. Fill Layer [1] with the mask was no longer needed, so I turned it off to avoid interference.

You can see how this mask looks in the shot – it’s the same one used for roughness (only in black and white, of course). This is how I painted the strands in Layer [2], highlighting where necessary and hiding where it wasn’t. It took a long time, but it was worth it.

The fur was probably the most labor-intensive stage in both sculpting and texturing. It took a while to get it right – first, because it was tricky to figure out and second because it simply took time to master.

During the facial texture process, I relied mainly on the color scheme and the original art. The roughness here is absolutely primitive because everything is drawn in Albedo.

Overall, I would say that roughness is primitive in the whole model. I did it like this:

• Desaturated the BaseColor map
• Placed it in Roughness in Fill Layer + Levels, then inverted it in the Roughness Channel (I didn't want it to shine where it was dark on Albedo). The sliders helped achieve a more suitable result.
• Additionally I painted where necessary in two Fill Layers (+ Black Mask + Paint) with Roughness values of 1 and 0.

Of course, this method didn’t work everywhere.

Rendering

I render in Marmoset Toolbag 4 – for me, it is the most convenient and fastest renderer.

There are four light sources in the scene:

• Sky – Provides a more or less uniform fill of light across the scene.
• Light 1 – Main light.
• Light 2 – Side light.
• Light 3 – Correction light (used to illuminate dark areas).

There is also an outline in the scene, it is the same mesh turned inside out. Here it adds that very 2D feeling.

And here are the camera settings, which I usually tweak, but I had not used Grain and Sharpen in art before.

Conclusion

It took a long time, considering all the corrections and the fact that I was working at the same time. At first, it felt unusual to paint with pronounced strokes since I usually have a fairly soft hand-painted style. But the most challenging stage for me was creating the fur in both the sculpt and the texture. It took a lot of trial and error to figure out how to make the fur believable and interesting while implementing it across all three dogs without symmetry.

This project was truly interesting to work on. I even enjoyed painting with rough strokes and realized that hand-painting should definitely be present in my work. Most importantly, I finally got the hang of making fur.

I would advise beginning artists to create something that genuinely brings them joy – over time, this passion will start to bear fruit. After all, when someone enjoys what they do, they will naturally find it interesting to learn, and learning is incredibly important. This is probably not even advice but a simple truth, and it applies not only to artists.

I thank 80 Level for the interview and interesting questions, and I appreciate everyone who took the time to read this! Wishing you success!

You can find me on ArtStation and Render.

Varvara Lychkovskaya, 3D Sculptor

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine