When I sat down with Ulysse to talk about his portrait, the thing that surprised me most wasn’t the final result, it was how he got there. He didn’t use a complex toolset, or a library of custom brushes, or layers of maps and textures. He painted the entire head, start to finish, using one brush inside ZBrush.
That wasn’t an exaggeration.
He meant literally one brush.
“Everything is done with just this base ZBrush square brush… I paint everything with this brush, no smoothing, no smudging.”
And there was something really refreshing about that. It wasn’t a flex. It wasn’t some contrarian stance against modern tools. It was simply the method he trusted the most, because it forced him to pay attention. It forced him to see.
He talked about how much he liked the discipline of it. When you work with a single hard-edged brush, you can’t hide behind blending. You can’t rely on softness to fix your mistakes. You learn to create softness manually. You learn to shape transitions through intent instead of automation.
“If I paint long enough, I can still have some soft edges, but I prefer using only a hard brush.”
There’s something I really love about that process. The simplicity. I think a lot of artists, especially early on, go hunting for complexity too fast. They collect brushes, packs, alphas, plugins… and accidentally avoid the very fundamentals they’re trying to build.
Ulysse did the opposite. He removed almost everything. And the result wasn’t limiting, it was freeing.
Painting directly onto the sculpt with polypaint, no layers, no texture maps, no blend modes, meant every choice he made stayed visible. There was no “fix it later” mode. Every stroke was intentional, and every mistake taught him something immediately.
“This is completely polypaint… no smoothing, no smudging.”
I think that’s why the final portrait feels so confident. There’s a rhythm to it. A visible hand. An honesty. When you take away the safety nets, the instinct has to show up. You’re forced into direct choices, and over time, those choices start to define your style.
Talking with him really reminded me that limitation isn’t a restriction, it’s a direction. It pushes you deeper instead of wider. It keeps you focused. It sharpens your eye faster than a library of brushes ever could.
You are forced to learn. and do. Not hunt for solutions or tricks.
And in the end, the art feels more personal because everything in it came from yourself, not your tools.
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Check out Ulysse's work on Artstation
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