First year is over, lets review!

The first year is pretty much over, final hand in is tomorrow and a long summer break is looming in the distance. So what better time to reflect on how shit my work used to be in comparison to now – especially after presenting all my work, I’ve had a chance to glance at everything and see that maybe, I have improved in certain areas.

The majority of the first term, I was learning something new every day. It was fantastic, learning new skills and feeling as though I am progressing even after doing nothing. Having never actually done perspective or environments before – or if I had, never doing them in a technical or accurate way – I was producing for lack of better words, complete crap. Getting the basics down was more important than rendering, and when I’d gotten what I thought was pretty accurate line work in a thumbnail, when it was transferred to a larger scale and I attempted to render it, it completely went to pot. In reality I feel I'm still the same as this, and need a lot more work doing to perspective to improve - so much so that it's almost an impossible feat really, but hell never know unless you try I guess. This mainly refers to 2 point perspective - as I've not improved in this in the slightest.

2 point perspective still super needs work

Term 2 was abysmal - I produced substandard, uninspired work throughout it's entirety and ended up with a barely passing grade because of it. I plateaued, with little to no progression in anything - uni work or anything outside of uni, and if anything declined in my works standard. This including design projects and observational ones. I produced a terrible character, a poor nonsensical vehicle and poor studies of still lives involving people. In addition to this, I discovered I can't use marker pens for rendering, nor can I produce quick ridleogram style drawings to a decent standard.

The final term is where I feel the majority of the improvement has occurred this year - maybe that's because it's the most recent and therefore the freshest in my mind, or perhaps because we produced a comparison piece as one of the projects. This was one of the more enjoyable projects, as it has shown the course to be helpful to me, and after the second year I felt that's exactly what I needed. 

The newer bradgate drawing shows that I've improved on the concept of levelling within an image, and whilst I feel the final for this year is somewhat lazy and empty looking, it shows I'm beginning to gain a grasp on the level of details between the foreground, mid ground and background. Also apparently I can somewhat draw rocks. Cool beans.

 

Another comparative piece is the 3 hour final piece produced at the end of the year - this being done at the same museum in which we did rendering techniques on dinosaur bones in the first term. For me, it felt a lot more fluid in producing the second - coming together a lost smoother. It would have been nice to do a true comparison between the two - maybe produce another bone based final as opposed to taxidermy.

In addition to these, I feel my ability to design characters, or other objects, has additionally improved - going from substandard "I hate silhouettes they're stupid why am I doing this" to a more accepting "okay maybe they're worth it" view, and this representing itself in my work. From the interesting character in term 2, to the Reef and then finally the 1970's inspired character, I feel I've not only gotten better in my drawing ability, but become more thorough in my research, as well as my ability in representing certain themes, and acquiring said theme to begin with.
My technique is another thing I have felt improve. Normally I'm really anal and neat - I enjoy seeing clean line work before I start doing a painting, whether it be digital or traditionally. The masters study has shown me that I can do different styles without catastrophic results. Choosing Jenny Saville was definitely the right choice as it's pushed and challenged my abilities. Normally I dislike recreating artists - I understand it's a brilliant way to learn new techniques and styles and that "imitation is the best form of flattery" or whatever, but most of the time it just feels like I'm ticking a box with it - doing it because I was told I had to to get the grades, it feels pathetic and cheap - like cheating... then again, I feel the same about overly referencing for images I create, and I know I'm definitely wrong in that view. However I enjoyed doing this project, and may play around with this style of painting again in my spare time.

Although I have improved in some areas, there's still a lot to improve upon and I'm looking forward to seeing myself progress further. One thing I super enjoyed was the modelling in visual design, so creating the reef character and dare say it, making the weapon. More to the point where it gets you to visualise something in a completely different way, and makes a project more solid when there's a transfer from materials from a 2D design to a 3D sculpture. In addition to this, it makes modelling something on 3Ds Max a lot easier as you have a physical sculpture. It's another aspect I'm looking forward to improving on in the future.

Game production improvement has been more noticeable than in visual design - my topology has improved, as well as my construction and my patients whilst creating. In addition to this, my texture application and unwrapping has improved - but this is something that has been done every project, so has had a lot more time to improve in comparison to 2D's projects with varying aims. One thing that has somewhat bugged me with 3D is the limitations on texture and tri limits - however at the same time I understand how the lower budget on these allows focus on learning.

1970s Character project

I really do enjoy character projects most of all. Fine detail observation as well – my two favourite things, suiting my need for things to be detailed and neat.

I’d like to say I had no idea what I was doing, started from a completely blank slate and could fully develop my work in an interesting way and push my capabilities but.. well, that didn’t happen. I wanted to do something opposite of my original idea, but I liked that idea too much.

My initial idea was to design someone based off of 1970s punk bands that I liked - thinking either Subhumans, Bad Brains or Crass. Eventually I decided on the Xray Spex - my moodboard consisted of Poly Styrene and Tank Girl (even though she emerged in the 1980s, she was a good influence for the personality aspect of my character).

  I found that some of my designs ended up orientating to a more 1990's/modern day crust punk influence - this being mainly due to what I'd consider a lack of research. As I wanted to do a "DIY or die" influenced character, I wanted to put her in somewhat typical,simple fashion clothing - more of a Poly attire, but then convey a more punk/tank girl essence about her. This was more difficult than I originally anticipated, as in some cases she ended up too cute or fashionable looking. It was also said I accidentally drew myself - the bottom right design. Oops.

For the finalisation it was a choice between the middle two designs, as I felt they were most like what I wanted to convey within the theme. I ended up going with the more Poly Styrene styled outfit - adding the jumper and socks from the other design as they just seemed to fit. I somewhat wish that I'd gone with the other design - adding more tears and some patterns onto the skirt, however what's done is done now - in future I think I'll have to consider more possibilities from further developments in order to properly design my final outcome.

Colour selection was a pain. I decided to limit myself to a selection of colours gathered from my mood boards - entirely from the 1970s stylised posters, the majority of which being from Jacknife posters. However because of this, I found myself limited in my colour combinations, as well as the majority of the colours coming out too bright for the theme I wanted to convey - a little too disco for my liking. In the end I decided to take the 2nd design in on the top row and adjust the colours of the jumper, and dirty her up a bit - accidentally going a bit too crust punk/street rat for the original theme I wanted to convey. However, it made the in situ easier for myself as I could think of a definite location to fully complement and express this underlying street rat appearance.

Weapon Project

I'm ignoring a term 2 summary because of reasons. This reason being that I hated everything I produced.. also ignoring I forgot I had a blog.. so let’s move on.

During term 3 we had the weapons project, which combined both visual design and game production to create some uber project. I hated it to begin with – we had to physically make the weapon which was pretty bad to be fair. Construction really isn't one of my strong points, which is definitely obvious from the final outcome. This being said, considering I've never actually done anything like this project before – drawing weapons, making them, so on – I don’t think my final outcome was as bad as it could have been.

To begin with, thinking up weapons was difficult.. the whole underlying construction was interfering with any idea generating process because fundamentally, the project limited you to the shapes you could use due to it having to be made out of found objects. Also, not knowing the basic anatomy or workings of a gun made it more difficult because I don't really like nonsensical aspects on mechanical objects - random wires, leather straps and bits of metal for aesthetic purposes doesn't really float my boat whilst designing. In reality, I'd have to shove this aside to begin designing which was possibly the hardest part. I'm too anal for a project like this. 

 From the moodboard, I gathered I wanted to do a Fallout-stylised weapon, maybe a shotgun or some form of blaster.Thinking about it now, I would have loved to do some form of over the top super gun stylised like it was from Fifth Element. But no, over done post apocalyptic theme was the easier choice for this project.

Silhouettes made me decide I wanted to do some form of shotgun..thing. Well, that was the aim. Combining what I found on a scavenge and in pound stores - which consisted of a can, shower gel bottle, hairspray cans, other hair product bottles, a shower hose, wire, a staple gun and various bits of metal. And tape, lots of tape - I furthered the design, then combining them further to create the final outcome.

The construction, as I said, didn't turn out as well as I had hoped, and in the end I ended up spray painting it completely black - which I found way too boring, and would need to do a paint up in order to help myself gather textures for the 3Ds model.

Photo of constructed weapon

Paint over of 3D model for textures

 Overall, I'm happier with the 3D modelled version in comparison to the constructed version - it's a lot cleaner and just generally more aesthetically pleasing. For this project however, I would have preferred to have a larger texture budget - as adding omissive textures would have been nice for the display on the side, as well as the canister. Or even a colour specular would have been nice - there's one applied for these renders but for hand in it had to be removed, and needlessly said it didn't look as good - or more specifically, how I wanted it to.

Final 3D model