Unlikely Hero - CG Boost Challenge

This is the result of the CG Boost Challenge #4. The theme was "Cute Warrior".
I have been really wanting to learn more about sculpting, so I knew that anything I decided to make needed that aspect to it.
I started with some rough sketches in Photoshop. I went through various ideas, the final idea though, was actually the very first idea I had had!
Diving right on in with collecting reference photos... I wish. I forgot to do that first thing again...
The elephant sculpt took probably four or five days working on and off. Texturing and rendering were probably another four days. I used 18 of the challenge days in total. I could have gone a lot faster, but... let's just say procrastination doesn't do anyone any favors!
I learned that I'm not very efficient at sculpting yet, there were a lot of un-necessary brush strokes. Also, trying to sculpt small hard-surface objects (Like the sword...) isn't worth the time for me. Through the re-topo, I end up basically modeling things from scratch.