For the 7 months that I have been using Blender, I have always been polygon modeling. However, now I think it's time to add in some variation and start sculpting. I have already sculpted Melvin and a few other things. What is a good first sculpting project?
Hi William, I'm a very recent blender fan (not even in the industrie, more like a hobby). I wanted the same and soon I noticed the personal lack of anatomy skills. On youtube you can find the cgcookie oldies where you see a lot of sculpting tutorials (eyes, mouth, ear, body, ..) -> recommend them. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVM7A9EPUUk
What I also like are the video's of Philippe Faraut (recommended during some tutorials I watched):
https://www.youtube.com/user/sculpit
Good tips can be found on flipped normals channel as well (using mirror, ref material (as usual), soft/hard skin, muscles, bones etc). It's ... from what I learned, sculpting takes a lot of practice, but it's worth it :-)
williamatics The only CG Cookie sculpting related things I've done so far are the Melvin Sculpt and my submission for last months class, for reference. Maybe a good idea would be a simple animal bust? It was the first thing I did when venturing out by myself. Though if you don't feel confident enough to venture out on your own yet there's quite a fair share of other courses on the website, not to mention this vintage anatomy sculpting course from CG Cookie themselves on Youtube, learning both sculpting and anatomy.
williamatics If you count backsides or nipples then yes, but no genitalia.
From my experience what gave me a huge boost in my sculpting skills was SculptJanuary: one sculpt a day for a whole month. Be aware that it is very demanding and I ended up the month with a sleeping cycle quite messed up.
If you cannot wait until January, I would suggest a similar approach: practice practice practice. Sculpting is a very forgiving method where you don't have to focus too much on the cleanness of the mesh and it's very simple to start a project. What you could do is get the list of all the imposed topics of the previous contest and do them (or one per week, depending on your own tolerance to workload). The most important if you want to focus on improving skills is how you sculpt and not what you sculpt, hence the benefit of imposed topics, so that you build yourself a good muscle memory.
Course wise, on CG cookie there's the creature modelling course that is quite nice, as well as the sci-fi weapon and of course my personal favorite that I keep mentioning over and over, the sci-fi helmet. Otherwise what I personally do is look at timelapses and try to breakdown the different steps. It's not really focusing on the keystrokes or getting the very a same brushes but more the idea behind it, i.e the why "Here I need to flatten the surface, here I need to sharpen the edges").
Good luck and have fun, I found sculpting is very relaxing and helpful for boosting my creativity!