Photoshop Workshop - Self Portraits

D^: faces

Studies - Hands & Photograph Study

Illustrator Time

In Simon's last Friday lesson, we were taught the basics of Illustrator. I'd never actually used it! It reminds me of a very large Pictoplasma book of my Dad's that I would look at much too often; it was full of Illustrator-drawn figures that would probably all work great as vinyl toys. Anyway, recently I've been thinking of logos and simple characters oddly and would like to create logos for use in my stories with the help of Illustrator !

100% serious artistic piece.

Simon asked us to trace a logo or design of our choice..... so by nature I choose a giant tofu-man.

And next up, in my "use as many of Illustrator's tools as humanly possible" test page I drew a weird bird (bottom right of that page) and decided to make it from scratch in Illustrator.

Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds should have had lazer shooting fabulous birds of death; but everyone's a critic.

Workshop Studies

Scaling and relative-scale is something I desperately need to work on

Animation - Pixilation Videos

Fun! But not my type of thing.

The Artist's Toolkit - Group Charcoal Animation

Poor guys gets shot in the head.

Invisible Cities - Moriana Inside Composition Perspective fix

 

I talked with Jordan about the piece I did yesterday. For one of my final shots I'll keep the same idea as this with the beam obstructing the view slightly, but fix perspective issues. On this piece the beams were slightly lower than they should be, making the overall scale of it look off.

Animation Workshop - 1

The morph! I had to animate from Vlad to myself. (Drawn by Julien!)

Really fun and hilarious exercise. A matter of key-frames and filling in the gaps. 

Maya Texturing Experimentation (Leading up to tutorials)

On the bottom picture I was just testing out materials on a random house I made using the knowledge I learnt from tutorials! There is something slightly unnerving about a house roof being slightly transparent.

Maya Tutorial 1 - GLORIOUS GLOOOOORIOUS EGG CUPS

My egg cups are complete and now I can rule the world with my army of egg cups. (And matching eggs..)

Okay, but in all seriousness, the revolve tool was extremely useful with NURBS! Is there a similar tool when polygon modelling?

PSWS - Brush Experimentation

I tried to make a brush myself. I played around with dual brushes to get texture onto it as well as just fixing some of the shape dynamics and transfer settings. Nothing too fancy. Breaking the "stamp" up at the ends into small dots is great when blending. Not too smooth but not too blocked either.

A quick doodle with the brush I had made inbetween thumbnails. I'll edit this post later with the brush uploaded!

Invisible Cities - Thumbnails 1 - 5

Lines, no colour. I couldn't decide if I was creating thumbnails for a cinematic purpose or for design a lot at the beginning. Having to do both simultaneously in a minute was a challenge most definitely. All I could think of when doing this first city was the idea of massive mountains that you had to do a lot to get through, clustered with a distracting environment then to come out the other side at an almost empty area except for the grouping of a city. Large empty spaces with sudden clusters of close-knit towns have been on my mind a lot recently.

Lasso tool mostly. My old friend. I don't usually use it entirely for things, though. It tends to get a bit too Matisse for my liking. (It's useful for paintings when you want to lose some of the softness.) I first thought of Venice when I read the description, but it soon turned into a community of nautical exploration. I wonder why I didn't add colour, at the time. 

"My colours" slowly started creeping into the concepts. I feel like I responded to this one better but I still didn't have a purposeful narrative in my head completely. Cloud creatures that get around using elaborate piping systems. 

This is the one that really stood out for me, suddenly I had a narrative and found it much easier to produce thumbnails in the time.  I imagine a clustered city sitting ontop of a cloud, but it is so silent and still it seems dead. Underneath it, life, plants and living activity. People on the cloud live in the houses and constantly fight the cloud deteriorating. When a hole is created in the cloud a mysterious force shoots beams of light downwards to "cover" the hole but ironically will deteriorate anything else it touches. Number 15 and 16 are what I deem the most successful because they show a sense of scale so removed from normality it makes me think "Just how many people are living there and are they okay?"

This page of thumbnails was a matchup of previous ones I had done, and combing a few concepts together. I painted over, added and erased elements.

Overall the thumbnail exercise was useful and definitely made me focus more on the concept rather than how it would look, however, a minute per thumbnail.. I see it like trying to say a sentence in an extremely short time frame. Half your worded construct will be there, and the rest will be sloppy because you're rushing to get it all out. All particles and no verbs or nouns! Perhaps the trick is to accomplish vise-versa. (Okay, enough with the metaphors)

The next set of thumbnails I do I'll probably spend longer than a minute per one, (Even 2 or 3 would be better) as I think it's important to at least resemble what you are trying to achieve regardless of skill for the purpose of communicating design. Especially when you don't have a design to begin with! If you don't have enough time to draw a circle how will they know you wanted to achieve that? 

Maybe I'm looking at it wrong!