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!

Week 3... to 5... I'm gonna try harder guys sry!

OK... yea this took me so long to get round to but it's been a really messy last few weeks. I have been hunting down new apartments, going on awesome trips and really struggling to stay on top of all the work! Term 1 was a walk in the park compared to this term XD

So its like week 5 now... well half way through week 5 yikes that went by really fast! So here is a huge update of the last few weeks, enjoy!

Costume Figure homework - Study of martial art costume folds! Such an awesome assignment

For this week we had to take a pose from class and redesign the costume to fit 3 different genres of entertainment.  Our model from class was dressed as a cave woman so we all had to adapt that character to fit 3 different stories.  I went with Horror, Action/adventure and Comedy... hope it's obvious which ones are which... :p

Anatomy homework, as you can see here there are a lot of talented gnomies to compete with ouch!

Rendering is certainly not one of my strengths but I am slowly starting to get a grip with it.  I think this is probably one of the coolest figure drawings I have done.  I thought I could make it easier on myself by choosing a pose that covered the face but this one had so much ambiguity that it actually wound up way harder :p

Anatomy is getting a little tricky now that we are studying skeletons but I had a lot of fun working on this assignment.  We had to chose a pose, render out the figure and then, using an overlay, map out the internal skeleton.

We are working on the Midterm for anatomy now. We have to choose or design an image of 5 or more characters interacting with each other.  I have had these images as desktop backgrounds for ages so while I was musing as to what to choose I closed google chrome and this background was on my desktop so I was like oh... yea lets do that!

I found a really good free skeleton rig on Creative Crash which I used to make some mock up pose to see what the skeletons are actually doing.  I switched out Graves (bottom right) with a Ryze pose from a different image since Graves's gun was covering so much of his body it was really hard to figure out exactly what the skeleton was doing. Next stage is to sketch it all in on the Biggie pad like Perspective class last term... wish me luck!

Week 3 Viscom and we are back to chalk. This time I had way more fun than the first time when we were just rendering primitives.  Each shape does take quite a lot of time though unfortunately so this may not look like a whole lot but it really wasn't easy :p

I also had to do two digital pages.  I tried out Lazy Nezumi and now I am hooked!! speeds up everything so much!

After our chalk week we moved back to prismacolor and ink pen.  This was way more fun I really enjoyed creating ships, robot arms, random things :) I like the sketchy look but also just how quickly you can get something, not necessarily beautiful but readable.

This week our assignment was to do a single image in Photoshop that looks like a pen and marker image.  In keeping with my VI theme this term I designed a couple of bad-a** gauntlets!

 

My first Art History assignment.  We had to recreate a piece from the Renaissance themed around our given animal.  I went for a Da Vinci anatomy study of a werewolf! I even did it on stained paper so it even feels kina old!

I didn't take any good photos of my armature with no clay on so here are a few comps of me building up my VI sculpture over 2 weeks.  So the above image is the closest look at the skeleton underneath all the clay.

 This was my character for the first week of clay sculpting.  We had to block out the rib cage and pelvis then add a little clay to the arms and legs.  After the class John left us with a new theory on how to sculpt by focusing on two simple things.  The silhouette and individual curves.  It doesn't sound like much but by keeping those two things in mind I feel like I am seeing a lot of things differently!

This is VI after the second week of sculpting.  We are mostly looking at the silhouette of each of the body parts.  I really like this approach because it is correcting one of the big flaws with my previous digital sculptures.  In my previous work I think I nailed the muscular form but the connection and overall feel of the figure was weak.  This approach ensures a dynamic an coherent sculpture from every angle.  I think we will be going in and detailing the muscles later but if you have a working silhouette your foundation is strong!

Graphic design is getting more fun too.  Our first few assignments were mostly to reinforce some of the graphic design perceptive techniques.  They were very helpful but at the same time not to exciting to look at. But this homework was fun! We had to create an illustrator style portrait of a human character using around 3-5 colors and only the pen tool.  It took quite a while but I do like the finished look.

Our assignment for this week was to take a memorable quote and create a poster using the typography theory we covered in class.

This term is hitting quite hard, we are starting to loose it a bit so yay for temp tattoos from Pam's office!! here's the Gnomon Spidey gang!!

OMG! The animation club organised a trip to Blizzard!!!!! It was so cool! I couldn't take many pictures or really talk about anything I saw at Blizzard but it was an incredible day! I was being very well behaved but in my mind I was going a little crazy. We got to see the animation department for Heroes of the Storm and we got a tour round the Blizzard Animation department too. The highlight for me though was the super cute Jackalope in the library! I want one!!

So it's a bit of a long story but I had to move out of my old apartment with very little notice and look for somewhere new.. I had to couch surf for a bit and I really appreciate everyone who helped me out! Thanks guys love u all lots!! But now I am settled in my new place which is so awesome!! and way way way way way cleaner than the last place so yay for that too!