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!

Week 3 - Looking Cool

OK.. Week 4 is packing quite a punch! I lost a big chunk of sleep getting this weeks vehicle design homework (will show it next blog) done after the last creature design homework set me back.  So this weeks post is a few days behind :p

 This week for vehicle we moved on to designing actual vehicles.  For the mastercopies this week we had to pick a couple of vehicles from Starwars.  It was a pretty tough choice since there are so many cool ships but I decided on Jango Fett's ship and the Jedi Starfighter.

For the main chunk of work I had to design 8 ships.  I got to try out a new ideation technique for this one I really liked.  I start out with a scribble and try to turn that into a ship shape.  The scribbles are a little more intentional than just scribbles though.  Looking at the Starwars shape language I made sure my scribbles were more horizontal than vertical and tried to keep the shapes more faceted.

After deciding on 8 shapes I liked I made 3 versions of each with little tweaks then picked the best ones.

 The final 8 designs were resolved in lineweight and then rendered.  I really liked the outcome! some very cool shapes.

 For environment this week I took one of my thumbnails from last week and tried to resolve it with more distinct value and some textures.  The techniques we are learning this term are helping so much, like resolving the atmospheric perspective first then putting lighting on top of that and finally ending with textures is helping the read of my pieces a lot!

For digital paintint I took my favorite 4 thumbnails and resolved them with light but no texture.  It is kinda cool to see these resolved but I think I have to push the lighting more to get back that really clear read they had before in the purely atmospheric perspective read.  This coming week I will be taking my favorite one of these and refining it further and adding color! a little scary but also looking forward to it.

 As well as the thumbnails this week I also had to do some Viscom exercises rendering primitive shapes.  It was really fun comparing these to my primitives from waaaaaaay back in Viscom 1.  It made me really happy to have kept up with this blog and be able to travel back that far in time and see what I was working  on :)

For Creature I took my lineweight creatures from last week and resolved them with value.  I tried to do them with combined linework and render but after I finished I thought they felt a little flat so I tried to take out the linework from just a small piece and one thing led to another and I lost a bunch of time fully resolving these guys :p  I do like the final look and next week I will be adding color to these!

I haven't been posting pictures of my sculpture yet... I just kept forgetting to take pictures :p But here is the Loomis head in progress.  There are a lot of steps each week but it is really starting to take form!  I also added an H as a Red Dwarf reference (for those of you unfamiliar with old British Sci-fi humor)  I don't think anyone in my class watched Red Dwarf though so it may just be funny to me :p

For Film History we continued with Horror and watched Rosemary's Baby and Psycho. Both awesome movies! I really like Hitchcock's work and how he deals with fear and suspense.  I had seen Psycho before and a while ago I watched the Bates Motel series on Netflix which was really good.  So I guess I knew the twist but it still made the movie fun to watch.  Rosemary's Baby was also really entertaining, in a dark sort of way.  I think the idea behind it was pretty sinister but what really got to me was the feeling of building paranoia and then the point where it all peaks and you feel genuinely terrified for the protagonist.  I don't want to say much more since it will spoil the movie but I do recommend it!

OK back to work I have to write my film history midterm on Donnie Darko, but first I have a loooooooooot of Environment design homework to get done for tomorrow :*( I am a little worried this week's work load is a microcosm of the coming final week! With Vehicle design so close to Environment design deadlines this will probably happen again.  Still really looking forward to some sleep this weekend.