Dissertation Ideas

Over the past few weeks, I've been thinking quite a lot about what I'd like to do with my final year dissertation work, and I've nailed it down to either one of two ideas, or possibly a combination of the two. As I'm more of an artistic person as opposed to a modeller or coder, I would prefer my work to reflect this. Also, I know that I would enjoy the work more if it was based around something I enjoy doing. My ideas are as follows:

1. A 3D model of a real life statue, modelled (briefly) in 3Ds Max and further sculptured, textured, rigged and rendered in either Mudbox or even ZBrush. I found that I really enjoyed working in Mudbox last year in Phil's character creation session, and I would love to explore it in more detail and let my work reflect on what I learned last year.
The statue would preferably be one from real life, so that I could take my own pictures of it as reference and build the textures from it as well. In Mudbox, I'd sculpt and texture the statue accordingly, as well as rig it, which was one of the things I didn't have enough time to do properly last year. Alternatively, if it's too repetitive of last year's process, I'd be happy to explore and learn about ZBrush instead, as it's more widely used than Mudbox, but also a lot more complicated.

2. Another idea that I had and would like to work with is based around concept art. This is the field of games design that I would want to work with the most, as a job. However, I haven't been able to think of anything where I'd be able to implement this without having to model something afterwards, which I'm trying to avoid as much as possible. I suppose the best thing to do is to combine this idea with the first one, and just do a lot of conceptual art regarding the sculpture, and base the art around still life / character creation as opposed to environmental concepts.

So this is as far as I've been able to think for now. It doesn't sound like much, but as I'm quite the perfectionist, quality definitely comes before quantity for me, and if it's something I enjoy working on, there's no limit to the amount of time that I would spend perfecting every last detail.