Alejandro Pereira

Alejandro Pereira is a highly talented freelance artista with more than 7 years experience in the world of film and animated series production. He decided to focus his knowledge by mixing two of his passions: 3D animation and traditional sculpture. Eventually, he narrowed that to just sculpture.

To date, Alejandro has worked with a large number of important licensors: Marvel, DC, Disney-Pixar and Universal Studios among them. Other credits include ARH Studios, Gentle Giant, McFarlane Toys, Pop Culture Shock, Funko and others.

His 3D printed statuettes are spectacularly detailed, with a great sense of form and movement. We hope that you enjoy this journey into the mind of a First-Class figure creator!

Do you have a real-world sculpting background or have you been sculpting digitally from the start?

I started sculpting traditionally almost at the same time that I started to learn 3D. The reason I started sculpting in a traditional way was because I was a collector without the money to build my collection, so I decided to make my own figures. I studied anatomy and traditional sculpting in a self-taught way while I was learning to use the interface of generalist 3D programs.

Everything changed when I discovered ZBrush. I seem to recall that it was version 2. Even then, the possibilities that the program offered were enormous, so it was only a matter of time and naturally I began to sculpt in ZBrush. Since I was still unable to physically take the figures from the screen, I continued to make my own statues by hand.

What were your reasons for going digital?

I didn´t think about it that much. I tried ZBrush and it was AWESOME. The process of passing my knowledge of sculpture to the program was a natural process. Currently, due to time constraints I don´t sculpt physically but I want to do it again.

Your sculptures always have a dramatic, yet believable pose. How do you go about creating that?

The most important things for me in the figure are the face, the action (movement) and hands. These determine if a figure is alive or dead. You can make a character with incredible anatomy, realistic textures and incredible details but if the pose or face don´t work the figure will look dead.

In ZBrush you always tend to lose your mind detailing things, but I think that is not the most important thing.

To practice good extreme poses there is nothing better than comics! I have read comics since I was a child and it is a great source of good references for dynamic poses and movements. I advise everyone to read comic books and practice drawing them!