Week 7: OMG!

This has been one heck of a week! and next week marks the week before the penultimate week.... I don't know if there is a name for that but never the less eek!!

So lets start off with figure drawing.

I have hit somewhat of a wall this week.  My progress has plateaued, it may be down to the increased workload for other subjects or maybe the work is actually getting harder but regardless I feel like I am going to struggle to get through this current stage.  I am very much looking forward to the day we actually cover shading....

The Sketchaton is up to its 3rd event yay! We wound up with Pixie, Surgeon and Despair.  Bringing it kinda close to week 1's Angel, Doctor, Envy.  Still we got some really cool submissions everyone is definitely getting better, and that's great to see :D  Kris won this week with the top right Ryuk inspired dark surgeon!

We had two awesome guest speakers this week the first was Neville Page!  He gave a great presentation starting with his childhood of him and his dad making amazing Halloween costumes and ending with a demo of a very cool 3D scan all the way to latex mask demo video.  I had actually seen the final video before at the Zbrush summit last year while I was in the UK getting up super early to watch Gnomon Livestream their events! Still feels so cool to be in the actual room this time!!

Neville's work is amazing! and his background in industrial design means the way he thinks is kinda similar to the way I think! Which is so inspiring to see where that can take you! I hope I can tread a similar path in my future!

Even giving a brief and broad talk he still managed to show a few really helpful techniques and approaches I had never considered before.  As an example sketching directly onto a base sculpt in Zbrush rather than diving straight into the sculpting seems so simple but yet so clever!! I wish I had thought to do that for a couple of my previous projects! I will definitely do it in the future!

Our second speaker of the week was Jesse Sandifer.  His story was soooooo cool to me since he started in Architecture and fell out of love with it so decided to transfer into character design and is now working for Blur!!!!  I was on the edge of my seat for the entire presentation and talked with  him a little afterwards too.  He had some great inspiring things to say and his work speaks for itself! Amazing! 

He has a pretty impressive range too from realistic human, through creature and even into the realms of stylized work too.

OK this may not have been the best use of my time considering this week we all got lumped with double perspective homework, our Viscom Midterm (images to come later in this post) and by Tuesday I have to prove I am at 70% with my Art History project!! But yea lets tick off the Creative Journal for Viscom :p

Still I am really happy that its all done and bound now, phew! I had to leave one page off this post since it was a collab with some other students and I don't know if they want it posted online for all to see but the rest is pretty cool!

This was for the bottom right page... which honestly was an excuse for me to play with Shrinki Paper!! its so fun! I have a few pages left over for key chain nick knacks etc :D

My Copic markers from viscom seem to work pretty well on the page but you have to be very fast or it winds up looking like the streaky mess on the purple cat :p

All ready and waiting to be cooked!

I forgot to take a picture of my Perspective homework before I handed it in this week :p so you will have to wait till I get it back on Thursday to see Roger from American dad lazily hovering in a sofa over Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water.

But for now here are my quick iteration sketches for this weeks assignment.  1 week ago we were told to pick something we think is cool.  I picked balloon animals.  Then we have to pick our chosen things mortal enemy. Obviously a cactus! Then we take these two things and turn them into cars having a drag race!! Hats off to Pastrana that has to be the coolest way to come up with the theme for a project ever!  We actually did the same exercise again this week to determine what our final would be.  We are all designing a temple/church dedicated to our randomly chosen cool thing.  This time I wound up with a temple dedicated to Bunnies!! perfect!

Anyway you can guess now which one I will go ahead with and next week you will see the final product! cool? yea I thought so too.

So this week marked our Viscom Midterm!! We had to take our newly developed knowledge of primitives and jam a few together into a character!  I tried to combine Caitlyn from League of Legends (one of my favorite ADC's) with an angry bunny! I really like the final outcome! it took a little while getting there but I think he looks pretty cool protecting his cupcake!

Hai!

And finally I managed to get round to doing a little work on my Art History project! honestly its 2:45 right now and I'm planing to get up at 8:00 to cut the rest of this out, sand it off and try gluing it together! I also need to get some OHP paper for my stained glass look..... :*( I am gonna be so grumpy for figure drawing tomorrow at 7:00pm

My dremel tool has been put through the paces these last few days.  I have gone through 3 saw bits and had to charge my battery 4 times :p  I even had to resort to buying a hacksaw to do some of the larger parts.  This better look good when its all done!

Anyway off to bed for my 5 and a bit hours of sleep! yay! Living the dream! (no honestly I totally am! this is so much fun you have no idea!)

Week 6 Over half way now

OK I'm a little tired so I don't think I can do a whole run down of this week.  It's all starting to blend together a little I really can't believe I'm going into week 7!!!! when did that happen! Anyway onto the photos :D

The Sketchaton lives on! we had a slightly larger group this time but due to rain (first time I've actually seen real rain in LA) we had to move into the Drawing Lab.  The 3 words this week were Cat, Sports Coach and Dreams!  We all had a lot of fun and this time Ray (Bottom right) won the honor of having her artwork as the main page for Sketchaton week 3!

Straight after we had a great presentation from Devon Fay.  He told us some cool stories of his time working at Blizzard and working on the Call of Duty titles! It was really cool seeing him in person having taken his online Environment Modeling course waaaay back in 2015. A group of us talked with him on the balcony with the rain poring down outside. It was a pretty cool visit! and it had me thinking of all the fun year 2 and 3 are going to be! really looking forward to getting back to 3D with all my new 2D skillz! 8D 

Figure drawing is going well this week.  I am getting a little better at doing heads and shading (viscom is helping there too).  I took Silvas class in which we covered head drawing in a slightly different way.  Again combining Silva's and April's approach seems to work really well for me.  This week my homework for April's class was to do the usual Bargue studies, do some longer pose drawings but also as an extra curricular project just sit and think about how to approach figure drawing.  The aim behind this last thing is to start to understand how my mind works and think about how I can make figure drawing work for me.  I've never really thought about it before but I had a few late nights just lying in bed and thinking.... not sure I have it figured out yet but it was a very trippy exercise I recommend it for anyone trying to mix up their approach or style a bit.  We will see if it works this week.

In Viscom we are moving onto mid-terms.  Our project is to design a character using the primitive shapes.  This weeks homework however was to take our primitives, with plotted shadows and value etc and add a highlight ribbon or small inset and try to see how this effects the rendering technique.  We have formed a kind of Viscom Anonymous group, we meet on Saturdays and try to crank out as much work as we can.  It's nice having the support and people to bounce ideas off.  Still it doesn't seem to stop the homework taking around 9-10 hours :p

Photoshop homework this week was kinda easy.  We had to add a little creature to our zombie character.  I was going to go with dragon but I kinda ran out of time so he will have to settle for his friendly lizard pet instead :)

OK so here is what took me the most time this week.  For Art History we had to give a 5 minute presentation on our time period, final project and progress.  I kinda went overboard and put together a 4:30 minute video of ripped footage from CBS, Assasins creed and stain glass reference and finished it off with the above animation (click it to start the animation).  The render for this took waaaaay too long. It was around 900 frames and each frame took about 45 seconds to render :p I got it started then realized I should have probably down rezed the image or something to speed up the renders but I just left it in the end.  I have all my materials ready to put this together, I just need to find 2 or 3 hours to cut it all out.

Caved in and bought a big a** fan for my desk it was soooooooo hot!

A great part of an otherwise flat presentation by Insomniac! There were some amazing speakers really inspirational and then there were some very dull or just downright repetitive ones :( I wouldn't have been so bothered but one of the speakers had to skip her Zbrush demo because they ran out of time. You could feel the simultaneous sigh of disappointment from the entire crowd at the point we all heard that.  Still some really cool projects and great information, I mean just check out the beautiful work in the above image! really looking forward to the new Ratchet and Clank game! even if I only get to watch lets plays :p no time to play games!

One of my classmates treated a couple of us to a free screening of Deadpool at Fox studios!! It was an amazing movie and reallllllly cool to see around a little of the lot! I totally reccomend the movie to anyone its so good! I will be seeing it again very shortly! Hopefully I can rally some more Gnomies to go watch it too.

After the movie we went to IHop! A first for me! but wow such good noms! The pancakes were sooooo good! I'm kinda glad there isn't one close to me, I might visit it too frequently :p 

We also had our first Gnomon Birthday this week! Happy Birthday Angela!!

And of course any excuse to make a cake!

Here is the slightly deranged Totoro cake

OK so a pretty long and crazy week this one! Onwards to week 7 getting close to the end now :O still sounds crazy to say!

Week 5: 4% Done!

Midterm, Term 1 cake!! any excuse :p

So yea week 5.  I can't believe I'm already half way through term 1 it's been a crazy few weeks and now that we are starting mid-terms soon its just gonna keep getting crazier!

So this week I was mostly focusing on perspective and figure drawing.  I am not enjoying Viscom as much now that we are looking at shading.  It't still a very useful skill and I know it will make my work much better once I have it figured out but I can't really go the extra mile and do something crazy and cool when I am struggling to make the gradients actually look.... well gradual :p

Viscom shapes with shadows :)

Figure drawing was a little tricky this week too.  We moved onto shading and blocking out the head, both of which I am not very good at yet.  Though with the Charles Bargue master copies April recommended for extra credit I got a lot better!  I am still a little surprised at quite how much it all helps.  I have actually got to a strange point in my figure drawing now, I think I have about 70% of the blocking in workflow consistent from drawing to drawing which means I can really see the difference between my work if I am say; hungry, just back from the gym, in a good mood or not etc. I'ts very subtle since I am still so new to all this but I am amazed that I feel like I have gotten to that level.  The teachers here at Gnomon are truly amazing!

Figure drawing is getting there

Mignola doodle 

I also tried out a couple of Mike Mignola copies, mostly because they are just really fun and his shape language is amazing but a little bit to get to grips with shadow shapes.

Perspective was really fun this week.  I finished off my 'Love Machine' project.  The brief was to design a machine that takes in the thing you hate and outputs the thing you love.  So naturally I made a machine that eats tax return forms and turns them into bunnies!!
I am also about half way through my next assignment which is to design a scene showing purgatory with stairs going up to heaven and down to hell.  This one was a little more rigid in requirements but the learning outcome was clear and I think I have it all figured out.

What chu looking at?

Love machine final in graphite

Construction sketch for Purgatory

We had a fun trip to the Getty museum this week too.  Feels crazy the amount of stuff we get done :p but it was a really fun trip and it helped me rethink a few things about my art history final so yay!

Cool stained glass! I think I might try to incorporate this into my final 

Views from the Getty, another beautiful day in paradise!

Some really cool sculpture too!

And of course my fav part of the visit!

This week in Intro to VFX we had a Gnomon graduate Kirk working at A52 as the Head of 3D.  A52 is a commercial house and they have done a bunch of very cool projects including the original Game of Thrones intro, the recent Daredevil intro and 2 league of legends cinematics (the Harrowing and Legionnaire).  It was really cool getting to hear how the inner workings of a commercial house operate, I don't think its right for me though.  I love the idea that you will be working on lots of projects in a much shorter time frame than for games or movies but I think Architecture school and Elena drilled too much perfectionist attitude into my brain and the idea of working on a 5-6 minute cinematic for a year doesn't actually sound like a bad thing to me :p I think I can see a few parallels with the game industry though in the sense that at a higher up level you really need those management and problem solving skills to understand what you are asking of people and to know if there is simple a faster and better way of approaching something.  I think if I did wind up working at a commercial house I would learn a lot of very helpful skills in a very short time! Though for now the end goal is still Riot and Blizzard :D

We had our first Sketchathon meet up today! This was a quick 20 minute sketching event set up by me and a couple of classmates.  We were inspired by Berube from a couple of weeks ago to try to brush up our sketching, and creative thinking skills.  We picked 3 random words, one character, theme and profession and wound up with an Angel, nurse dealing with jealousy.  There were a bunch of very cool ideas floating around but it was clear to some of us (definitely me) that we could do with practicing sketching a bit more. I might try and take photos of everyone's work next week since we are gonna try to make it a weekly thing!

So yea long week and by the end we really needed to blow off some steam.  I have no idea how but we managed to find a few free hours to play ball and go to an amazing Texas BBQ diner.  It's so much fun hanging out as a group and hearing everyone's stories.

A few of our number enjoying the sun at the park just up from Gnomon

great photography courtesy of Ray :)

Great trip to the Texas BBQ place! I slept verrrrrrry soundly after this meal!

Anyway I have to get back to work.  Currently working on my Art History mid term presentation and trying to fit in some perspective and figure drawing homework too :p

Week 4: phew!

OK I have no idea why but this week has been waaaaay harder than anything week 1-3 threw at me!  I had to work the entire weekend just to stay on top of the homework.  Maybe its because we started getting real Perspective assignments but everything felt a little harder this week.  Not in a bad way mind you in a sort of.... long distance run kinda way. Simply put it felt challenging and I do like a good challenge :)

Figure drawing this week kinda has me feeling a little hmf! For some reason I think I have tipped the scale and all the new stuff we are learning about fleshing out forms etc has actually pushed out some of my previous gesture work :p  I talked to April and she has prescribed me some Glen Keane master copies to get me back in the swing of it.  So you will hopefully see some cool Little Mermaid, Tarzan or Tangled master copies next post :D 

On the right I did manage to do some extra master copy homework from Charles Bargue and Andrew Loomis which helped a lot but I did them after I did the rest of the work which was a little dumb....

Mid week a bunch of us tried out this great Colombian restaurant! the food was amazing and the portion size was huge!  I got to try real Empanadas which were quite different from the recipe I made mine from.  Thanks Angela and Dan for taking us out :)

First real Perspective homework we got to choose between designing the room of either:

A 13 year old girl who just happens to be a serial killer

A pothead clown

or a priest who is obsessed with taxidermy.

 As I hope you can see I went with the serial killer.  I added a few satirical elements like a poster of Trump, and implied that the little girl managed to order a high powered sniper rifle from Amazon :p  I also added a bunny... because I'm me :p  Some other people in class came up with some awesome concepts and filled their rooms with lots of cool little things. It was pretty inspiring and I did a little bit of a redesign after I saw some of their work. I am really enjoying getting to know some of the guys in my term they are all really fun interesting people and like minded too its really nice to bring up an obscure movie or band and have like 2-5 other people be like oh yea I know that! :)

This weeks viscom was fun but veeeeeery time consuming! We had to render 16 primitives using verithin Prismacolors and then using chalk or charcoal blow up the best of each into what you see in the image above.  The principle was quite simple but the amount of stuff you need to pull it off is a little nuts!  Im happy with the result especially the cone :) but no time to go wacky and do something extra fun this week :*(

For Art History we had to design 3-6 thumbnails for our finals and submit them for peer review.  The images above pretty much explain what I'm doing so if ur interested give it a quick read if not lets move on to the final assignment Photoshop homework.

So this week for Photoshop we are looking through Adobe Bridge, Adobe Camera Raw and a little bit of extra tweaking in PS.  We have a library of about 16 or so photos and we have to pick 6 and tweak them to enhance the mood of the piece.  You can see the original above and below my tweaked image.  I only included one of the 6 but you get the idea. I don't seem to have any problem creating nice...ish looking pics when I shift the temp down towards the blue spectrum but I cant seem to make anything look cool in the reds.... I'll have to work on that in the future I guess.

Gym wise I am chugging along and seeing some nice improvements in strength which is always a good thing :)  Though I met with my awesome personal trainer Kent again today who put me through the wringer! After a pretty intense session we ended with a weighted rope exercise where you have to make a standing wave with this pretty heavy rope.  Sounds easy but by the last set I was about ready to collapse! Then I had to head to Gnomon and do 3 hours of figure drawing holding my arm up :p I am really enjoying going to the gym though, having a little break from work in the middle of the day helps put things in perspective and really helps me problem solve too.

Anyway sorry this post was a day late, crazy weekend and all.  Tomorrow we have a field trip to the Getty museum yay!

Bye