Honoring Prince William How Britain’s Royal Mint used ZBrush to create commemorative coins celebrating the Prince of Wales.
The recently released commemorative coin celebrating Prince William’s 40th birthday featured contemporary portrait design by Thomas Docherty, a long-time product designer and engraver The Royal Mint.
Though Docherty’s designs have been featured on previous coins, this was his first solo portrait and he wanted to portray the prince as a mature, modern dad and future monarch. Using ZBrush to replicate clay sculpting techniques, he opted to depict Prince William at a three-quarter angle rather than a more traditional side profile.
We talked with Docherty about his work and approach to creating a dynamic design that captured the future king’s young and stature.
Please tell us a bit about yourself and The Royal Mint.
Docherty: I’m originally from Glasgow, Scotland, and I moved to Cardiff in Wales to study industrial and product design. I joined The Royal Mint in 2003 and I am still fascinated by the different design challenges I face working on commissions for international coinage and commemorative and collectible coins.
The Royal Mint is one of Britain’s oldest companies, dating back over 1100 years. It has a long history of working with precious metals and continues to be responsible for minting currency, not just for the UK but for other countries too. As the UK’s home of precious metals, The Royal Mint also produces commemorative coinage and bullion products that are popular with collectors and investors.
I joined The Royal Mint as a trainee engraver and began a two-year apprenticeship, which was great because I got to learn and use the more traditional skills of hand engraving on steel, die sinking, low-relief plaster sculpture and low-relief clay sculpture. I also got to develop my skills at the jeweler’s bench.
Nearly 18 years later, I’ve married, had children and recently turned 40. My department has also changed, evolving from using very traditional hand skills to working predominantly digitally across artwork, sculpture and production.
Has working digitally changed your approach?
Docherty: Until a few years ago, I was working traditionally with pencil sketches. I had always produced my final artwork via digital painting. Now, I start by sketching digitally as it’s just a more efficient way to work up ideas. I use Illustrator for type and Photoshop for painting and drawing. I move to ZBrush for sculpting. There’s no fear of making mistakes or changing things because you can always undo what you’ve done.
Undoubtedly, my training in traditional skills, experience working with coinage and understanding of the technical limitations of the material helped prepare me for sculpting digitally. I’ve been using ZBrush about eight years now, and it’s so efficient, from the subtleties you can get in textures and forms, to the control you have and ability to quickly revise a model. I like that you can really play with it, working things out and adding layers onto whatever SubTool you’re working in to make tweaks.
Tell us about the brief for the Prince William coin.
Docherty: To keep designs fresh, The Royal Mint shares design briefs as a competition around three years before release, and this brief was no different. Open to internal and external submissions, all designs are submitted anonymously and judged by The Royal Mint Advisory Committee.
This brief specified a portrait, and I wanted to enter because I had a very clear idea of how I wanted to capture him. Usually, two or three artists are shortlisted for these competitions, and they go on to submit bas-relief sculptures of their designs, with one being selected as the winner.
How did you feel when you won the competition?
Docherty: I’m incredibly proud to have produced this design and sculpture. A royal portrait has always been a goal for me. I see it as a pinnacle in the field of coinage, and I think it will forever be a highlight in my career.
After I won, details of the portrait were tweaked, and there was a process of mastering the model to an appropriate amount of relief for the coinage. I had a master sculpt in ZBrush that I treated individually for different specifications of coinage to make sure I got the impact of the form and scope on different materials and weights. The Prince William design was used for five different gold and silver coins with varying thicknesses and finishes. All of those differences played into how the model was refined.
Can you walk us through your design process?
Docherty: I had five working days to go from the brief and research to final submitted designs. I started with research, gathering images of Prince William from different angles and in different poses to figure out the structure of his face. Then, I started sketching before moving on to development and sculpting.
I also looked at how he wants to be portrayed based on official websites and researched typography. In this case, two of us were shortlisted with further feedback stages from the advisory committee, so the process kind of stretched out. Both designs were sculpted in bas-relief, mine in ZBrush, before being resubmitted for final selection and approval.
Were there any specific challenges that ZBrush helped with?
Docherty: The style of a lot of coinage sculpture is quite clean and polished. But for the William design I spent time looking at really loose clay portrait sculpts where you can see the thumb marks smoothed into the form. I wanted the portrait to have that kind of looseness and vibrancy about it. It was a difficult task because I'm not used to sculpting like that but working in ZBrush gave me the tools to achieve that finish digitally, which helped massively.
What do you enjoy most about your work, and do you have favorite pieces?
Docherty: I find researching and sculpting a variety of subjects really interesting. Although the product specifications of coinage, bullion bars and ingots don’t change greatly, the variety of subject matter that you can portray on those surfaces is vast.
I’ve been enjoying a lot of projects recently. We released a Dinosauria Collection that I sculpted. The artist producing the designs is fantastic; the standard of work he sends through is really a joy to sculpt from.
What are you looking forward to next?
Docherty: I’m continuing to work on The Royal Tudor Beasts series, a collection of 10 coins that will be released over five years. The collection celebrates the ten beasts chosen by King Henry VIII to line the Moat Bridge of Hampton Court Palace.
I also have a personal project that has been on the backburner for several years that I’d like to submit for a British Art Medal. Hopefully, I’ll find the time to finish that.