Week 2: Not too bad

Slightly harder to stay ahead of the workload this week.  I still have a few things to finish before I get my tough Tuesday work pile on. I have actually started timing the hours I spend on each subject each week.  It has been pretty revealing since what I usually estimate is waaaaaay less time than an individual homework actually takes... It hasn't changed my routine at all but it has been kinda interesting to actually have timesheets again, though I used to hate filling them in for work.

Digital painting in class still life.  I am loving the way we are learning to paint digitally in this class! It is very slow but the results are just so cool!

This was my homework which was pretty much trying to replicate what we did in class.  I couldn't get as cool a lighting set up since I don't have any lamps so I had to rely on daylight.  The funny thing was that I gave myself a 3 hour limit for this one and just as the last 10 minutes were approaching the daylight started to fade so I couldn't have carried on if I wanted.

For environment design we had to do a very similar homework to digital painting.  Since the assignment was the same I decided to approach the drawing style differently.  One of my peers suggested I try a technique where you just throw down brushstrokes and then carve in and try to make a narrative.  This was actually pretty fun and was very different to my usual way of relying on linework.  I can see it being very helpful if one is stuck with an idea but since the outcome can be kinda random it may not be the best when the story or style has been locked down.

I also had to come up with a story for some of my future painings.  We were advised to take an existing IP and put a twist on it.  That way we don't have to worry about developing a complex story.  I am going with a redesign of one of my favorite games from my childhood; Baldur's Gate.  I am going to design it as a first person action adventure game (think Skyrim) but I am also going to intertwine it with the Warhammer fantasy world by looking at the origin story of my favorite army the Skaven!  If any of you are interested in the Warhammer fantasy universe I will be basing my story on the Doom of Kavzar.

For creature design I took my silhouettes from last week up to linework level.  It was really fun getting to play around with forms and really run with some of the ideas I had last week.  I did wind up refining the silhouettes a little and changing the perspective on my quadrupeds to make the overall form more readable.

My story for digital painting is based on the Blue light, a Grimms brothers story.  I am twisting the story a little by making the creature summoned by the blue flame an automaton rather than a dwarf.  I am planning to try out a slightly World of Warcraft or League of Legends style to my paintings for this class but I haven't gotten the full brief yet so I am keeping my style options open for now.

This weeks homework was to take one of the two scenes we will be working with for that class and experiment with the composition.  The first scene I am doing is the point where the knight, exhausted, abandoned and injured falls upon the steps of the witches house and begs for help.

Sculpture 2 has been very chill so far.  We are working through the stages of sculpting a bust in class which doesn't leave a lot left to do for homework other than finish up and refine.  The class moves pretty fast so it is a little tricky to keep up but I can see the forms starting to come out. It is such a gear shift from sculpture 1.  I know everyone including the teacher has said this already but I have to say I was assuming people were sugar coating it.

Lastly we have moved onto horror for this weeks Film History.  We finished up taking about comedy in class and had a very brief discussion of the films we watched last week.  I was expecting a little more, I hope we get a little more time to talk about this all next class.

Anyway the two movies we watched this week were: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Freaks

I didn't care much for the Cabinet of Dr Caligari.  It was very very slow and the font for reading the cards (it was a silent movie) was, as you can see in the above poster almost illegible.  Which combined with the inaudimate time given to the audience to read them and the frankly boring subject matter resulted in a very dull movie.  There wasn't really any horrific elements for me maybe I have been spoiled by modern horror movies or games but I always thought it didn't really take much to freak me out.

Freaks on the other hand was great!! I was actually first introduced to the story when I was binge watching 30 second bunnies! and I have been curious about the film for a while but I never found the time to watch it.  Again there was nothing really scary about this film but it told a great story of acceptance, exclusion, betrayal and retribution!  I would say it is more of a drama than a horror film but I guess the ending probably does shift it more towards horror.

So onto week 3 and away from thumbnails!

Term Four Begins!!!

The last term of the first year begins! Feels like term one was just a few moments ago, Gnomon is really going fast.  So this term I have a lot of design classes: Digital Painting, Creature Design, Environment Design, Vehicle Design, Sculpture 2 and Film History.  That is a heck of a lot of digital painting.... I hope I can wrap my head around that soon!

So the first week wasn't too bad there was a lot of work but after some of the crunch of term 3 and the early mornings of term 2 I barely broke a sweat.  I even found time to cook and exercise yay!

Creature design had us working on static cages for both quadrupeds and bipeds.  Though it keeps the designs a little stiff it really helps with perspective.  I think I may have goofed on this homework though I kinda skipped the all important ideation stage and just went straight from research to final designs.  As a result I am not all that happy with my designs for this week.  Lesson learned I won't make that mistake next week.

I also had to design 3 humanoid, 3 herbivore and 3 carnivore designs based on a planet very similar to earth.  My twist on the planet design was to have earth 2.0 to have a blanket of pollution and dust that limits the amount of light reaching the surface (think Interstellar).  That means that all my creatures are very malnourished and forced to rely on roots and weeds for nutrition.  I looked at a lot of scavenger reference and for the humans a balance of severely malnourished humans mixed with some circus freak reference.

I do kind of like my rat host design (top right) the concept is that this rodent has formed a symbiotic relationship with a sentient fungus.  The rodent feeds the fungus from its own mass and the fungus works as a poisonous smoke bomb against predators when they are both attacked.

For digital painting I did a still life study of something on my desk using the painting techniques we learned in class.  It was weird for me because there was no sketch stage I had to go straight to rendering.  It actually worked though I really like the final outcome!

The second step was to do 10 thumbnails that purely use atmospheric perspective.  Just relying on the rule that things become de-saturated and usually lighter as they recede into the background.  This was pretty fun and also gave me another chance to work on my composition.

For vehicle class I had to do two master copies and 8 'Spaceboxes.' I liked both assignments but the space boxes were especially fun!  The task was to take a rough boxy shape and make it look dynamic with decals or cut lines etc.

Lastly for Film history we had to watch two movies 'Duck Soup' and 'Blazing Saddles'

I really didn't like duck soup! I found it confusing, obnoxious, too silly and even at just over an hour far too long.  I appreciate that it is a film from a time when people were experimenting with communicating story visually but it is just not a film for me.  The only redeeming feature was the mirror scene where two characters are miming in front of each other perfectly.  It wasn't the first film to do this but it is a good gag that has been repeated a lot since.

Blazing saddles however was a brilliant film! I really enjoyed the story and humor.  There was a great balance between silly and self aware jokes the characters were appealing and the allegory though depicted a little bit shocking for this day and age still holds up as a great message.

OK week one may have been a little more chill than normal but it was over pretty fast! here goes week 2!