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!

Term 2 Week 1! I'm Back Baby!!

Wow! OK so yea super late nearly done with week 2 and this has been a heck of a couple of weeks!

Break was awesome, I didn't actually do any work other than a couple of odd doodles here and there but I did go to the beach, go hiking, check out some new areas in LA, play a lot of very late night games (alcohol included) and then subsequently sleep off all that fun! but now I'm back at Gnomon and they started us off at full pelt this term!

Already starting to feel the grind!

So the main challenge for week 1 was our first Viscom 2 homework.  It didn't sound like a massive undertaking on paper but in the end I wound up with 25 pages of drawings each of which containing several complex shapes which ranged from 10-20 minutes each! but I managed to finish it and catch up with the rest of the homework we got this week.  My gym time has suffered and my coffee intake was alarmingly high for the first week back but I survived!

So here is 1 weeks worth of Viscom 2 homework! I reallllllly hope the next few assignments aren't this rough! especially since this term we start Character Sculpture 1! woo!

So for Character Sculpture I am going to attempt to create a 20" tall model of VI from League of Legends!! I am really excited to get underway with this project! I completed a couple of orthographic views to get the rough idea of her proportions and costume.  I wont't be attempting to recreate her entire suit since she has a very complex costume and I want to actually survive this term :p

I am going to include one of her giant gauntlets though! I really want to try a bit of hard surface sculpting as well as organic.  For those of you not familiar with the above terms hard surface sculpting is a name given to creating props usually made from metal, wood, plastic etc opposed to organic forms like trees, creatures, humans etc.  By incorporating VI's gauntlet into my design I will get a chance to see how to sculpt something made with rigid surface by hand.  I hope this will help me with my Zbrush sculpting in the future since hard surface sculpting in Zbrush can be a really tricky skill to master. Wish me luck, I hear sculpture class takes up allllll our time this term.

 

My two new drawing classes this term are Anatomy and Costumed Figure Drawing.  Anatomy has been a bit of a Figure Drawing refresher so far we haven't really looked at a whole lot of anatomy yet but it has been nice getting the rust off those skills after break.  I think I will be trying to go to some of April's figure drawing classes again just to keep improving.

Our anatomy assignment was to do a couple of master copies from either Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael or Michael Angelo.  I preferred Da Vinci's style so I went with a couple of his works.  I like how they came out but I think he actually used Pen and Ink rather than the Charcoal I used for these studies.  We have to do a similar project for Art history over the next two weeks I will try to get my hands on a fountain pen and give it another try but this time I have to incorporate a wolf into the design.

Here are our classes master copies. There are some incredibly tallented people in my class! Having to pin up my work like this reminds me of Architecture school back in Bristol... I will have to up my game if this is going to be a regular thing!! and remember no fingerprints or bad pins! Elena taught me well!

Costumed Figure Drawing is a blast!! I really enjoy seeing all the different shapes and cloth folds.  There is just so much more character in these sketches compared to the more fundamental figure drawing work from last term.  I am so glad that I committed the extra time to figure drawing last term though.  It's really paying off in this class.  I can't wait to see how I improve as this seems to be shaping out to be a very valuable skill!

The homework was to set up a few different cloth still lives and render them out.  I have never been all that good with rendering but after this weeks Viscom assignment and allll those hours of rendering I think I might actually be starting to get a handle on it.

OK so that was a rough week I hope I can keep the posts back to their usual schedule but all these early morning classes are taking their tole.  Stay tuned more to come next week!!

Week 10 - I survived!!

So that's the end of term 1 wow! The last 10 weeks have been a complete blur of crazy work and lots and lots of fun.  At Gnomon we usually have a few catch up classes in week 11 so the term didn't really have a definitive end it kinda trailed off instead.  It is so weird to walk around Gnomon now, there was such a buzz a few days ago with everyone frantically trying to get their finals finished or taking up large numbers of computers to render out really cool looking projects.  Now though it feels a little more like a ghost town, everyone seems much more relaxed.  I think I preferred the crazy buzz though! well in a few weeks we will have our next term intake and things will start to kick off again :D

This week we had another Gnomie birthday!! Happy Birthday to Danny! I had a lot of fun putting this cake together.  I think its probably the most colorful one I've ever made!  It also went well with the emergency supplies the Gnomon staff bring out for finals week.  There is fruit and yogurt but also lots of coffee and doughnut holes... I might need to detox over the next couple of weeks :p

Sketchathon is still going well.  This weeks theme was Insane, Zombie Engineer!  I am thinking of mixing up week 11 Sketchathon introducing some new rules we will see how it goes :D 

I finally managed to finish my Art History final! yay! It turned out OK in the end.  Not quite as neat as I would have liked but with the tools I had I am happy with the final look!

The stained-glass look actually worked!! I might use something like this in the future for a game level! I think there was something like it in God of War...2 or 3 where Kratos has to navigate his way through a maze and the perspective lines up differently depending on how you look at the level. Also like Fez I guess but yea a fun thing to play with especially when its there in front of you to move your head around.

I also got the LED + watch battery combo to work! I had used it before when I was concepting some cool Starwars themed drinks (red and blue LED's) by connecting the LED directly to the battery you don't need any wires or complicated circuits.  It does have a flaw in that you cant turn it off but these things can run for days on a 3V Lithium Ion battery so yay! It makes a cool night light too.

 This was my final for April's Figure drawing class.  The model brought in her pet lizard! who was super cute and really fun to draw! Honestly I think the lizard came out better than the person :p

I also went to Silva's figure drawing class final too which was the same idea, long pose focusing on rendering.  I definitely improved from my first attempt I just hope I can keep trying these out and getting better.  I'm still not so fussed on getting rendering to a very high level but I still want to get better so I can apply the principles to digital painting in the later terms.

We had an amazing talk from Shelly Wan. It was only an hour but she covered some amazing stories and examples of her work at Pixar!  It was really inspiring to see someone so talented and I hope I can apply some of the workflows she elaborated on to my own painting in the future.  I think my main take away was how important color and light play in telling the story from a psychological standpoint! One example she gave was how in the montage in Monsters University where Mike starts to overtake Sully the lighting flips from having Sully in the light to Mike taking the spotlight.  It's not something you actively pick up on but it helps to tell the story! I want to combine that theory with the stuff I learnt from April and the master copies I did from Watkiss when I eventually get to storyboarding. 

Finally got my Alien sofa perspective back! it really doesn't feel that long ago that I was working on this :p time flies way to fast here!

I got an OK grade but for me it was just a lot of fun to play around with the new perspective techniques I am learning and apply it to buildings I really enjoyed studying back at UWE.

 

We had another talk this week from Grzegorz Jonkajtys.  His talk was about integrating miniature sets into 3D animations.  It was an amazing presentation and even though I didn't care much for the final animation the behind the scenes look at the sets was amazing!! It looked a lot like what I would peak in on at the NFTS.  Pretty much it boils down to people using really random things to model with: spaghetti, Starbucks mint packs, buttons, super glue packs, pen lids etc.  Having a mind that can see those every day objects and know how to apply them to a set is really cool to watch!  Greg finished off with showing us some of his own work one of which I found absolutely amazing! its a little dark and its told from the point of view of the 'unreliable narrator' which is my favorite kind of story! Please check it out its only 7 min long but it will hit pretty hard, ARK.

I have my make up class for Perspective 1 on this coming Thursday but I think I am pretty much done with this project.  I would like to ask how one plots shadows the 'Perspective' way rather than the 'Viscom' way just to see if there is a difference.  This is my combined detail and plotting page its pretty rough but it has all the info.

Above is my clean plotting page which just has the calculated details.

And here is the final piece. We are still not allowed to shade so its pretty much all lineweights etc.  Drawing the rabbit characters was super fun!

So my story is that this is a church in which a large reliquary holding the ancient, original bunny.  The modern evolved bunnies make pilgrimage to this church to better understand where their origins and to ask for blessings etc.  Its kinda like cat from Red Dwarf mixed with Zootopia.  I had a lot of fun working all the details out.  Playing with the camera angle etc wasn't as fun but I can say it was a lot easier than the camera work I had to do for my Environment Modeling class last year.  Maybe I am getting better yay!

Lastly this is my Photoshop final.  It took a lot of work and I got some great critiques from my class mates! I am very happy with how it all turned out and I look forward to my class on Friday where I will get some more feedback and get to see what everyone else came up with :D

So back at the NFTS Sean taught us a very good project management system called Kanban.  This is a small piece of the Agile management workflow but I really like it! Its a pretty simple system but it helps you and others see what you are working on and if you have way too much or even too little work on your plate.  Other than the few post-its that fell on the floor this was pretty much my first term..... really fun but also a little crazy to see all in one pile :p I'm guessing I might need a bigger board for Term 2!