Week 2: Crunchy already

This week started off pretty chill but when the Product Design and Character Design hit they hit really hard!  I just about managed to stay on top of it all this week but I had trouble getting to the gym or cooking regularly again :p hopefully Week 3 will be better.

This was extra credit work based on the homework from the other storyboarding teacher.  I saw the other class working on this last week and it looked like a lot of fun.  I picked one of my favorite League of Legends cinematics to do the master copy from.  April mentioned this was a good practice waaaay back in term 1 and I'm really happy I found some time to try it out.

This was my actual homework for Storyboarding.  The brief is to design a story based around the title 'My Pet Wants My Dinner'.  At this stage we are just designing the room for the story to take place in and the pet character.  I am going for a story revolving around a guy cooking a nice meal for his date who he didn't realize is a vegetarian.  This next weeks homework is to do 20 panels to explore the story.

For Zoology we took a trip to the La Brea Tar Pits.  It was a pretty cool museum and Andrea gave us a really in depth break down of horse anatomy.  After that we were sent around the museum to complete 5+ pages of sketches.  This one was my favorite.

Prop Design this week was pretty intense.  We all had to do 4 pages of prop sketches and then render 3 per page, then come up with a story for our future projects this term and if that wasn't enough we also had to gather a lot of reference to explore prop form and function through film, TV and games.

Finally for Character Design we have moved on from silhouettes onto caricatures.  I think I am just about grasping the idea behind this but its a lot trickier than I thought.  The second part of this assignment was to design another 24 characters but this time from imagination.  I am about half way through that with only a few hours to hand it in :p here goes!

Term 3 Week 1

So here goes another term.  For Term 3 I have:

Product design, Character Design, Storyboarding, Zoology, Design History and Color Theory

The first week was pretty light since Product Design and Design History both got cancelled.  That was super lucky for me since I flew back to LA on the Monday and arrived just in time for my first Character Design class but totally would have missed Product Design had it not been cancelled.  We also didn't get any Zoology homework and the Color Theory and Storyboarding homework was pretty light phew.

This is pretty lucky again though because for Character Design our homework was to draw 120 Silhouettes divided up into 4 categories which took literally all week! Here are the categories: 

Fantasy 

Pokemon!! (in honor of Pokemon Go) 

Robots 

and general Sci-Fi

Our teacher for this class is pretty awesome! and he brought rice crispy squares to class so yay! Looking forward to my next class tomorrow!

I haven't had time to work on any other homework yet this week so I hope the Character design homework cools down in the future weeks! XP

The rest of the classes were pretty simple just basic introductions but I can tell that color theory is going to be a lot of fun and Story Boarding is gonna be awesome.

Story boarding with Francis was really cool! we watched 'The Wrong Trousers' in class to analyse story telling!

Outside of school I have been taking walking breaks to catch Pokemon!  Which feel much better than my sitting on the sofa breaks from the previous terms.  I have also started drinking green smoothies and cooking more so hopefully this is a start to being a little more healthy at Gnomon!

Term 2 and a fresh start to Term 3

OK so Term 2 is over and I'm now starting the first week of Term 3!
Thankfully I don't have nearly as many morning classes so I can actually try to perform like a human being rather than a homework machine :p  I don't know why but having a full week of morning classes like last term was really rough.  Technically it should have been easy to just pop home and cook a meal or go to the gym but every time I thought I had a minute or so to do that I would look at the pile of homework I had to complete and change my mind.
Hopefully this term will run a lot smoother and I will be able to blog, cook and exercise regularly!

Anyway this post will mostly be an update of any work I can find from week 5 - week 10 of Term 2.

 For the later weeks of costume figure drawing we got to experiment with some borderline character design! The assignment was to develop three warriors from different time periods and after that three cocktail dresses from different decades in the 1900's 

Our final for costume figure was to design a comp that included three of the characters we had drawn during the term.  I went for an assassin breaking into a sci-fi cryostasis laboratory that houses humans from history so she can break them out of their sleep.

Here's the final, took quite some time but I also had to find time for sculpture etc so not quite as tidy as I would like but for my early attempts at digital painting I am pretty happy with the outcome.

For Art History 2 our final was to create something based on an artist from the 20th century

and beyond.  I went with a Banksy inspired telling of the Little Red Ridinghood story but this time the little girl is the dangerous character.  A bit of a social commentary on internet culture ;) read into it what you like.

In Week 8 of Charles's figure drawing class the class got to pose for 5 minutes each.  It was a really fun day and much more challenging than I thought it would be.  Above are a few sketches from the teacher, that's me on the left in the suit.  It was a lot of fun to pick a costume and see how everyone interprets it. 

I did quite a few figure drawings for anatomy class most of which I probably wont be posting on this blog but I picked this one just to remind myself in the future how far I have come since my first week in Term 1.  I hope I can continue to find time to keep practicing this despite not having another life drawing class till gesture drawing in a few terms.

I was a late bloomer with sculpting.  I was trying to balance all my classes evenly so I didn't really get to hit those crazy sculpting hours that John was expecting but I did learn a lot from this class and I think I will definitely be doing another sculpture in the near future!! 

So here she is.  I was down to the wire finishing this one! I was literally carving out the rocks on the base at 12:59am right before they kicked us out of the sculpture lab before our final crit!

I was a little nervous about VI's arm though even though there is a big chunk of polystyrene inside the gauntlet it was still pretty heavy and I was so convinced I would get in at 9am the next day to see her arm completely slumped down... but no it held and is still holding to this day yay!!!

I found the rendering of this final piece pretty relaxing but I got kinda nervous towards the end about smudging or tearing some of the work!! I had a bunch of tissue paper to rest my hand on and the paper was taped to the desk to stop it moving! thankfully it all stayed in pretty good condition!

All of our anatomy finals up on the wall :)

(unfortunately they were accidentally discarded over break :*( bother!)

Material studies for Viscom 2 :)

Crazy ink-splat tests to help come up with ideas.  I kinda like this approach but the lack of direction doesn't sit too well with my design process... which is maybe a good thing because there is no way I could have come up with some of these designs through my usual system.

This character came from one of the above blobs :p

More fun prop design for Viscom.

Working on my final piece.  The brief was to design a movie or game poster.  I went for a gritty reinterpretation of Red Riding Hood.  I also wanted to practice some curvilinear perspective (like the kind you would see looking through a fish eye lens)

Here is the final rendered piece! I think I am starting to get a grip on digital painting but I have plenty far to go.  Hopefully in term 3 with Color Theory and then in future terms with Digital Painting and Advanced Digital Painting I will get a firmer grasp on the technique.

Me transcending to term 3

Trip back to the UK.  I only got to head home for a week for my dad's wedding but I still found some time to catch up with some of the guys from the NFTS :) it was a great day out, complete with sandy chicken, long talks and card games!

Hope to see you guys in LA some time!!

Day of the wedding, me and my brothers looking very suave!

The wedding was really fun! great food, old friends and luckily amazing weather!

I also managed to trick my phone into accessing the US App store and downloaded Pokemon Go!!!!!! woop! I was getting jealous seeing everyone posting pics back in the US and its not due to release in the UK for a while.  I only managed to catch my starter Pokemon Squirtle, a Rattata from England and a Rhyhorn at the Dublin Airport so I have quite an international team now.

One of the tiniest planes I've ever flown on!

And there was a Snake on the plane too!!!!

So I've landed safe back in LA and I'm back on track in Term 3 so here goes!