Finals!! woop!!

So tired... Just handed in my last project for this term phew! It's been a tough couple of weeks getting all this done but I made it and now I get a couple of weeks rest before I move into Year 2!
That feels really crazy to write down! Year 2 it really doesn't feel like its been that long since my very first post here at Gnomon! but looking back I can't believe how much I have improved! Well onwards to Term 5 and Intro to Maya! Wish me luck

Creature Final, Just like for the midterm the final was just refining the value painting but adding color and textures.  I still think that painting colors on top of value seems to go a little muddy, its more obvious in the below paintings for my Digital Painting class.  Still I really like these two creepy spidery creatures! They were a lot of fun to design and render.  Creature class has been so much fun this term! Kyle was a great teacher and I think the class was structured with enough freedom for us to really experiment with some cool creatures while simultaniously being controled and intense enough to really push me to the next level.  Combined with the foundation from Zoology last term I feel like I have created some really cool kinda nasty monsters!

This term I really tried to step away from cute and bunny like for my work just to see what I would come up with... Seems like the opposite of cute for me is gnarly and spider like.. makes sense! :p

A little more work on my Midterm but most of the last couple of weeks were spent on the final

This was a much more fun scene to design and paint! Thankfully I have improved a lot since my digital painting from Van Arno's costume figure drawing final!! I went straight to color with this one, after doing a small value thumbnail.  I think this preserves the colors better but takes a lot longer and is trickier to think through.  I hope all this practice will help though when I try out hand painted 3D textures in the future!

Alex was a great teacher, I really feel like I got a tonne out of this class in terms of color, presentation, composition and story telling! It am pretty proud of my final work though I really am looking forward to advanced digital painting next term to see how far I can take it!

Film history finals were really fun! We all had to give a 10-20 minute presentation on a chosen film.  I went with one of my favorites 'Requiem for a Dream' and focused mostly on Aronofsky's story telling style.  I think I may have grossed people out by showing the scene where Harry injects his infected arm with heroin though... but it was really crucial to the point I was making :p

Everyone gave really cool presentations and it made me want to go back and re-watch a few of my old favorites! I especially liked the review of Megamind and had to watch it that night while I was working on my vehicle final.

Jay also left us with some great finishing words about life and what it is we will be providing the world with in the future.  I wont spoil them by paraphrasing them in this blog but trust me they were pretty inspiring.

I went for a post apocalypse pick up truck style car for my final.  It is a kind of light Mad Max style.  I turned the car round from the thumbnail to show off the front rather than the back and I redesigned it a little to feel more unified.  Vehicle has been a pretty tough class this term but I have really learnt so much.  I am so happy I took this class and that I had the time to really commit to the homework and get as much out of it as I could.  The reviews in class were also really helpful, I was so glad that Shawn could give me such honest reviews.  I get the feeling some teachers at Gnomon will sugar coat their reviews so it was a nice change of pace.

Environment took a little bit of a back seat this term.  It was a great class but just because it was scheduled so close to vehicle class I really had to try hard to schedule time other than the night before to work on the homework :p  Most weeks that wasn't too tough but a few times when my files corrupted it was environment that suffered the most.  Still I am pretty happy with how these two finals turned out.  I resisted the temptation to combine my vehicle final with my second environment painting.  It seemed like a good idea but I guess I wanted to get a little more mileage from this term so I decided to try to cram another painting into finals week instead XP 

Both pieces are from my Skaven origin story.  The top one is from the Skaven sabotaging dock equipment in a human city where the second painting is the summoning of the Horned Rat Deamon (the god of the Skaven).

I almost cant believe how much progress I have made with Environment and Digital Painting this term! Thank you D and Alex!!

D was also super cool for our last class and bought us all pizza! I also found a little time to bake some cookies for the final class!

The last sculpture class was pretty chill in the end.  We spent the class working on filling in the left hand side of the torso and then tweaking a few things before we left our models to be graded.  This was actually a pretty cool class I am glad they schedule it the way they do with the Sculpture 1 class being much more intense and demanding.  This class felt more like a master copy exercise, with a whole term to focus on just the torso and face and having everyone do the same so we can critique each others was a great learning experience.  I feel far more confident working in clay now, I can't wait to see how it translates to Zbrush!

OK time to sleep now! C you in 3 weeks!

Week 8 Catchup

Just a quick post to catch back up, Finals is in full swing here with 2 weeks left to do 6 paintings 1 sculpture and a presentation :p

 Gearing up for the creature final I had to come up with a creature description, kind of like a project brief, describing some of the physical characteristics of my creature.  I decided to have a little fun with that and designed a data log from a character in my creatures universe who is reluctantly hunting these things.

 These are some of the preliminary sketches for what direction I want to take my creature in.  For the final I have to design two separate creatures that both fit the above description.  I am thinking of going with the far right and far left of the bottom sketches.  I will probably tweak these designs a little and push them to fit the description better.

 For the official midterm I had to finish 5 renders.  I chose to take a few of my previous designs and fix them based on the class feedback and then try to polish them a little more.  I am pretty happy with the design work in both the hatchback and the sports car but the tank is by far my favorite!

More development on my Digital Painting midterm.  Not a whole lot more to do to finish this painting off.  I will probably add some more textural detail to the highlighted elements in this painting and maybe try to push the vines to be a little more 'viney'

The other part of this weeks assignment was to develop some thumbnails for the final painting.  I am going with the end of the Blue Light story where the protagonist summons the mannequin to exact his revenge on the king and royal guard.  I am tweaking the story to push the sense of danger here so rather than summon a little dwarf character I want my protagonist to summon a deadly golem.  Either as a large muscly looking creature or a nimble deadly one.  Lastly I really want to have all three characters in the composition the knight, king and golem.  I think the best comp for this is probably the top left but we will see.

I polished up my midterm for Environment, I went with the dining scene for my infrastructure but I decided to add a little more gross to it with the strange warpstone infused goo being served to the Skaven yum!

Sculpture and film history have been going well too, I am going with Requiem for a Dream as my final presentation and since my midterm paper on Donnie Darko went so well I will probably stick the the same formula.  In sculpture the torso sculpt is coming along, the initial block in was tricky but from there the rest is much easier.  Hopefully I will remember to take a photo of it soon for the next post.

Week 6 : Midterms

Week 6 was another pretty intense week.  The vehicle midterm was pretty tough! but I managed to get it all done :) I have probably mentioned it in this blog before but at some point it is expected for Gnomon students to have to sacrifice work for one class to do their best in another.  I agree this is probably the way to go since I think it is better to be really good at a few things rather than be mediocre at a lot.  Still I have not had to make that choice yet (despite coming close a few times) but this term has really helped me accept that reality and I hope I will be able to make that choice in the future when the time comes.

In Creature design we are done with our 3 little guys we have been working on since week 1 and before we start the Dark World project we were given the assignment to transform a portrait photo into a creature.  I went with a mermaid theme and all those years of texturing things for my architecture class really helped :) I am pretty happy with the final outcome I was even brave enough to push the color saturation a little rather than stay in the safer muted color range :p

Digital painting bugged me a little this week.  I was really looking forward to this assignment and after the self portrait I did last week I was really hoping for a good result.... I am really disappointed with this work :( the thing that bugs me the most though is that it looked better before I tried to pull it all together a lot of the face planes got blurred out with lighting and color correction and I didn't notice it happening I don't really have the time to go back and do it again but I might try making a few more corrections before class. Still I have a lot of other assignments to do, maybe I will just do a few more exercises like this over break instead.

The Vehicle mid term was pretty tough this week I spent a long time iterating on each of the above themes before I settled with these three designs.  Still I am really happy with the end result I am still impressed with how much I am improving in this class.  The skills are also totally translatable to product design and to rendering and sketching in general.

Environment design was pretty fun too.  I am starting to get a better grasp on working with color.  I tried using overlay layers for color this week instead of using my value as a hard light layer.  The results are a little muddy but I think they are good enough for color experiments and now I can paint on top of these layers for the final piece.  The thumbnails are still all set in the Skaven universe but the assignment was to design 'infrastructure' pieces as a world building exercise.  My favorite comp narratively is the Skaven nest, the strange green glowing pots pouring liquid warpstone over normal rats to transform them! but the composition is a little flat and repetitive so I wont be taking that one to a finished painting.  I will probably pick one of the kitchen pieces instead.

In Sculpture 2 we finished the head and will be moving onto the torso next week :) I still have a few things I want to fix on the head but I am quite happy with where it is now.

Week 5: Catchup

Phew I missed a couple of posts so here is a bit of an image dump to catch up on the homework for the last couple of weeks.  It is getting increasingly more difficult to get all this work done and get some decent sleep :p but the projects are all chugging along and I am really enjoying how much I am improving.

For creature we are coming to the end of the first main project, so I will be saying goodbye to these three guys soon and moving onto the next project. To develop them further after the value stage we looked into adding color and this week we finished them out with some photo texture integration.

Digital Painting has been really cool too. In class we have been doing a few exercises, our last still life used organic objects, which were much harder, and we also did a master copy and a self portrait too.  The self portrait was a little scary and I thought about not posting it too :p but I got over it, not bad for my first self portrait painting though right?

 

Homework wise I have been developing my first main comp for my interpretation of the 'Blue Light' story.  I also did some Disney master copies to try to understand color a little better.  I am slowly getting the hang of color but it is a very tricky skill to wrap my head around, hopefully it will click a little better soon!

For Environment design I worked on a similar assignment to Digital painting by experimenting with some interior environments and developing lighting studies and then finally ending with a full scale value painting with some overlay textures for detail.  I picked a scene from my interpretation of the Skaven origin story.

For vehicle we worked on military vehicles and then for week 4 sports cars.  Our teacher also gave us all a hot-wheel each to use for week 4's master copy! 

I'm still pretty tired so the words for this post are coming kinda slowly :p so I think I'm just going to leave it here for now and hope that next week I can post my week 6 assignments on time!