A Hat Full of Sky

Fantasy Illustration / Real-time 3D Book Cover • Personal • 2023

NAVIGATION TIPS: Desktop: scroll to zoom; right-click to pan; click and drag to rotate. Double-click (or tap, on Mobile) anywhere on the model to center that part and rotate around or zoom into it.

FOR
Personal work / fanart, 2022-2023

WORK
Character & environment design, 3D modeling, sculpture & hand-lettering, hand-painted textures

TOOLS
ZBrush, Cinema 4D, RizomUV, 3DCoat, Sketchfab

INFO

"...the sky was midnight black, shorn of stars. This was the landscape of Tiffany Aching’s mind."

I discovered Terry Pratchett's Discworld about a couple of years ago. Not sure how it took so long, since I love fantasy and magic. Truly, better late than never. These books helped me through a lot of the last year. I swallowed a good chunk of the Discworld series, starting with Guards, Guards! and Tiffany. Since then I’ve carried in my own mind an image of granny’s shepherd hut as it existed in Tiffany’s head, her hat, and witch herself. This 3D art took a few months (on and off) to realize.

A cutaway diorama of a landscape in the top of a witch hat: a shepherd's hut on a hill.
"On top of a round hill was a four-wheeled shepherding hut, with a curved roof and a chimney for the potbellied stove. Inside, the walls were covered with the yellow and blue wrappers from hundreds of packets of Jolly Sailor tobacco."

Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

Angle of a 3D model: a shepherd's hut on top of a hill.
Angle of a 3D model: a shepherd's hut on top of a hill.

The hut was modeled from scratch; painted to look like a 2D illustration.

Painted 3D sculpture of a girl with brown hair wearing a witch hat. The top of the hat is a cutaway diorama of a landscape: a shepherd's hut on a hill.
Close-up: Painted 3D sculpture of a girl with brown hair & green shirt wearing a witch hat.
Angle of a painted 3D sculpture: the back of a girl with brown hair wearing a witch hat. The top of the hat is a cutaway diorama of a landscape: a shepherd's hut on a hill.
Faux book cover design sketches (rough comps) for

Faux book cover: quick design concepts. With further refinement, the 3D model could lend itself to alternates.

Painted 3D sculpture of a girl with brown hair wearing a witch hat. The top of the hat is a cutaway diorama of a landscape: a shepherd's hut on a hill. Hand-lettering around the girl says
"Anyway, she preferred the witches to the smug handsome princes and especially to the stupid smirking princesses, who didn’t have the sense of a beetle. They had lovely golden air, too, and Tiffany didn’t.
Her hair was brown, plain brown. Her mother called it chestnut, or sometimes auburn, but Tiffany knew it was brown, brown, brown, just like her eyes. Brown as earth. And did the book have any adventures for people who had brown eyes and brown hair? No, no, no… it was the blonde people with blue eyes and the redheads with green eyes who got the stories. If you had brown hair you were probably just a servant or a woodcutter or something. Or a dairymaid.
Well, that was not going to happen, even if she was good at cheese. She couldn’t be the prince, and she’d never be a princess, and she didn’t want to be a woodcutter, so she’d be the witch and know things, just like Granny Aching…"

Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

© Olena Shmahalo