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.

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!