Week 3: Feel the burn!

Here's to another crazy week!  Chugging along with life drawing and Viscom.  Getting into the gritty side of Perspective and a guest speaker from Blizzard!! 8D woo!  Though its starting to feel a little crazy thinking we are already approaching week 4! that's nearly half way! I feel like I just started :p

This week for figure drawing we moved onto fleshing out the legs which we tried to combine with the torso work from last week and I think its starting to have a big effect on my work.  It is very clear now how unrefined the arms and head I do are compared to the new approaches I am learning for legs and torsos.  Next week we are tackling arms so I cant wait to see how that looks :D.

Viscom was great fun as usual :) we are now cutting up our primitive shapes into cooler looking shapes! I went a little off road with this weeks homework and drew some props instead.  I will probably be told off for this.  I did do some basic shape adjustments too but drawing the props was just too fun! Especially since its the kind of stuff I like to doodle anyway, it just looks right now!

Early on in the week a couple of guys from Allegorithmic payed the Gnomon Games Group a visit to do a QnA before a bigger presentation to the whole school.  I have used Substance Designer a little for my portfolio but seeing what these guys could do with the software was amazing!! I honestly can't wait till I get to play around with Substance Painter and Designer for real! but that's a long way off.

Mid week we had a guest speaker from Blizzard Jonathan Berube.  He worked as the VFX Art Director on some of my absolute favorite game cinematics including Starcraft Heart of the Swarm.  They played that cinematic along with a couple others on the big screen in the Gnomon stage with some amazing acoustics! I didn't think my eyes could get that big but I enjoyed every second!!

On a side note some of you who followed my older (now deceased) blog while I was at the NFTS may remember I actually snuck into the movie theater and played the Heart of the Swarm cinematic on the big screen but I was doing it through youtube so even though it was epic this time it was even better!!

Anyway back to Berube.  His presentation was great he gave us a little back story as to how he wound up at Blizzard, referencing the sword and shield you get for 5 and 10 years working at the company! so cool.  Then he went on to talk about one of the shots he worked on for the Heart of the Swarm cinematic and how it was all put together.  He even went into depth about how you can use a single frame to animate over a 3D plate in essentially 2.5D.  That might not make sense to some of you reading this, its a little tricky to explain without awesome pics and even awesomer hand gestures but trust me it was a very cool technique! I definitely wanna try it out in the future.

I then rounded out the week by joining Golds Gym located right behind Gnomon so yay for convenience! but booo for aches and pains! Though I'm at day 4 now so once you get past that first week and it becomes a habit it gets a lot easier.  Waking up the day after my first session was rough though I hadn't done any decent training in a verrrrry long time so I could just about raise my arm above my waist... this made reaching for cereal for breakfast a genuine challenge :p

Anyway enough rambling I have to get to bed, early morning tomorrow so I can get my: Perspective, Art History and last tweaks of my Photoshop homework done! bleurgh

enjoy some pics

Figure drawing, Legs and Torsos next stop arms

Allegorithmic visit

Jonathan Berube doing a 30 minute concept painting! we got to watch the whole thing!

Viscom Homework :)

Photoshop Homework using masking to change up an image

Phew, That's week 2 done!

Week 2 went great!! I had my first Perspective class which was a fun experience! I think it might get a little tricky as the weeks progress but I can see now how Viscom, Perspective and Figure drawing are all going to come together.  :D cant wait!

So despite having the full work load this week we still manged to arrange a couple of get togethers as a term!  Tried out this great local restaurant and had my first Tai Tea which was realllllly yum!

We also had a pizza and Cards Against Humanity get together, which is kinda obligatory when you get a bunch of students together.  Its also great to test how fun a group is especially when you get cards like 'dead babies' and 'a sassy black woman.'  Everyone had a great time though which I think bodes well for the next few years.

Oh and I got some space in the fridge at the apartment allocated to me so I did some baking this week! Brownies were a must obviously but I also tried out Beef Empanadas which look like mini Cornish Pasties.  They came out pretty well I think, i'll have to consult with Angela one of my Colombian classmates.

Anway onto the pics :D

Group dinner outing 

Yum!

More yum!

Viscom moving onto spheres and cylinders... and droids! 

Perspective homework was to draw a room and a view of two buildings from above.  Each was only allowed to take 20min.

 We also had to do a self portrait but i'm not alllllllll that happy with mine so I will probably not be posting it :p 

More figure drawing.  Tried out the sepia toned pencil this week.  It lets me experiment a little bit more before committing to a curve with the black charcoal pencil.

Anyway off to bed Figure drawing tomorrow yay! Onward to week 3!

Week 1 Done!

Wow this was an intense first week! and I know that its actually like the easiest week in the next 3 years :p still it was a tonne of fun!

So I have had the intro lesson for all but one of my classes and they have all been amazing.  Viscoms was a lot like the basic perspective exercises I did at UWE when I studied architecture so it was kinda familiar territory.  Part of the homework however was to draw some boxes free-hand on top of a grid and man my free hand skills have all but dissipated :p I had a small paper bin full of failed attempts before I finally settled on 5 pages I liked.

Figure drawing was fun too, I think I spent most of my time this week working through the gestures and then rattled off the hands feet and master copy in the last couple days.  The master copies were way harder than I thought they were going to be! I guess I am just not that good at the static orthographic poses. But I wound up drawing the given poses about 5 times each so by the end I had something passable :p

Photoshop class was nice and simple and the homework was actually a lot of fun! We had to design 5 Facebook banners any way we wanted.  

Art history was nice too since it was mostly discussion based rather than essay writing.  Each of us were given a time period to research and develop into a project by week 10.  I got Gothic which is awesome! plenty of cool things to look into for that.

Lastly on Wednesday our entire term all got together and had a lecture from the Head of the school! which was very inspiring and at the same time a little sobering!

Each of us also had to go up on stage and say a little about where we came from and why we are here.  I have met some really cool people at the school and it was crazy to hear how many of us have almost the exact same stories!

anyway that's enough text how about some cool pics :P

Fist off my 5 facebook banners!

Vis Coms (All the boxes!)

And lastly we have some figure drawing from this week

First Class

OK I probably wont be posting after every class but I just had so much fun in my figure drawing class with April Connors!  I'm a little rusty but its slowly starting to come back to me :) Though with my homework for this week (30 gesture drawings, 2 master studies and 5 hand and feet drawings I'm sure by next week I will be back where I was a few weeks ago.

I'm going to post my work even though its a little terrible mostly so I can look back at it in 10 weeks and see where I started.

We had a pretty simple introduction with some basic warm-ups and then moving onto some gesture practice which I will definitely be using in the future to warm up with and then finished with some proportion practice and guidelines for measuring out what we are drawing.  I am going to get a little extra practice this Friday though with an Indiana Jones and Lara Croft themed 'clothed figure drawing' session! Cant wait.
Well time for bed, tomorrow I have my first Visual Communications class.  I've heard this is one of the big time consumer classes so I hope its as fun as figure drawing was!

One day to go!

Friday was soooo fun (yes those extra o's were completely necessary).  We got shown round the amazing and very confusingly laid out campus, then we got grilled for a couple of hours on Gnomon policy etc. Doesn't sound as much fun on paper but the atmosphere was great. The studios look so cool and there is tonnes of fantastic art every time you turn a corridor. I am very looking forward to seeing Gnomon up and running on Monday!

I met a bunch of very interesting people too some of which were taking the 2 year track so I will see them from time to time panicking about render times etc that's a whole year off for me :p.  The majority of us on Friday though were taking the 3 year program, I am really looking forward to seeing their work and working along side them too.  Again though I can't wait to start on Monday!

So today was mostly errand running I cycled down to the Grove which is a very classy kinda shopping street I guess, I don't really have anything from home to compare it to.  To be honest it mostly reminded me of walking down a theme park like Alton towers or Disney land with the large departments, green features and walkways, maybe a couple of rides would make it an even more fun experience.

I did find Santa and his reindeer just chilling in the parking lot though. Maybe he is outsourcing some of his work this year.

On the way back I stopped off at one of the biggest art stores I have ever seen. I probably sound a little naive saying that in the USA but I still can't get over the size of just about everything here! The cars the roads the stores just everything is so big! And I love it! I've traveled to the US a few times before but it still amazes me. 

Lastly before I sat down to fully unpack and prepare for my last day of freedom for 3 years I used my Gnomon enrolment sticker to jazz up my bike! It fit almost perfectly on the coloured tag on the top frame.

Induction today!!!!!

So after a few weeks of boring paper work stuff, visa application etc I finally made it to LA! It's an amazing city I've only been on a 15 minute walk and a subsequent 2 hour cycle and I saw so many cool and diverse areas. Apparently the weather had been pretty bad over the last week with lots of rain but thankfully it's gotten much better! I saw the sun and everything!

Today though is the induction day for new students and I am so excited I woke up at 5:00am though that might be jet lag.
I have been working on a mini project while I was sorting out everything to leave the UK and here it is:

To be honest I was hoping to get a little further and try adding glowing textures, rigging and briefly animating this character once I found out that Sketchfab now allows you to post animated models.  But I ran out of time so I just got to the basic texture painting stage.  I might pick this up again later but I doubt I will have time with Gnomon's workload.  Still it was a lot of fun and a nice break from all the travel/immigration planning.

I will try to post more regularly now and show some of my work at Gnomon.  I considered taking this blog down and starting a new one but I kinda like the idea of looking back in a few years and seeing where I started from.

Anyway here goes!

Going to LA!!

So its official I have been accepted onto the Gnomon 3 year Entertainment Design program :D

Its been a really long few months working on my portfolio. I haven't blogged much mostly due to the hours I was sinking into refining my old work, working on new projects and brushing up on my basic sketching.

But it all feels worth it now that I have made it into this amazing school! I have never improved as much as I did when I was taking the Gnomon online courses which feels like a very long time ago now. So needless to say I am really excited to get started in January! First though I have to work out a whole lot of logistical fluff, selling things here, getting together some funds, immigration stuff etc. its going to be a pretty busy few weeks ahead.

I know I haven't been posting much on this blog and as I said before the high work load was a big factor but it was also a little difficult being on my own and not having a lot of direction. I tried to land a few jobs and take on some freelance but most of it didn't pay off. The hard times did make me reflect on where I was and where I wanted to be with regards to my digital work and that was the main impetus spurring me on to go back to school. I believe I have the drive and passion to be up there and it took a lot of time to accept that actually getting there was going to take even longer than I had thought 3 years ago when I decided to move off my original plan to become an architect. Anyway enough of that onward to sunnier pastures!

For those of you who read this blog and enjoy the pretty pictures I am sure the quality of work shown is going to get much better and I hope to be blogging more regularly when I start in January!

But for now I have included my portfolio submission to Gnomon along with a quick video flick through of the sketchbook I sent over. Enjoy!