A lazy week hardly worth writing about

I've really slowed right down this week, pretty much because I've been lazy and been sleeping a lot.

 

I managed to finish the values of my centaur archer and have started to consider colours but its very slow paced.

 

I also did a quick cloud study just to do SOMETHING. Although I watched Mad Max this week so I intend to do some fanart soon!

Centaurs everywhere

This week I decided to take a step back and do some stuff just for fun; my energy was starting to run out and I'd been doing so many studies I just needed to draw again for fun. 

Ragnar (TV series Vikings) portrait

Statue study

The first of the Centaurs

 I've recently been watching Spartacus which is set in Ancient Rome and is mostly about Gladiators. I really felt like drawing Centaurs again as they were one of my favourite things while I was younger but I always lacked the ability to draw them how I wanted to. I thought it would be a fun idea to paint a centaur and give him gladiator style armour. This way I got to do a little reading and visual research and produced this. I didn't do an awful lot of concepting, which I'm kinda guilty about but at the same time it was just for fun!

Centaur 2

 I still had some different ideas and styles of armour that I wanted to try out so I just kept sketching!

 I then decided I wanted to make one into a more interesting illustration so here's a WIP. I think once I've finished this one I'm going to look into more Greek mythology and try and concept some of the characters from there. Fortunately a lot of creatures in Narnia and Greek mythology cross over so I can tie these projects into each other.

It's only been a week?

I find myself checking the dates of my last blog post because it feels like it's been so much longer since I last posted.

Picking up from where I left off; last week was pretty unproductive and I ended up getting stuck with art block and I was determined not to waste my time moping around not doing anything.

Study

Firstly I'll start with this study above. I've been really put off doing environments/landscapes for ages because they never turn out very well. I really didn't want to give up because I can't stand the thought of being terrible at it. Like really. So every so often I have a go at a study and see if I can do it. For a long time I was working on this study and it was looking very flat and just not right when something finally clicked, and I realised what I'd been doing wrong for SO LONG. My colours weren't de-saturating the further away they got. It was that simple. I really don't know why I just didn't get it.

Everything changed after I realised this, and I was buzzing with arty energy once more!

Male torso study

Practice

To see whether it was really true and that I had infact discovered what I was doing wrong I tried painting some more (keeping to trees for simplicity) and it still worked! Although this painting wasn't as good as I obviously wanted it to be I was overjoyed to finally see some progress in my environment pieces.

Photo study

I looked for some fairly simple photos to study because I didn't want to overwhelm myself too early, especially considering I'd only just got the hang of it.

Queen Jadis final concept.

Taking a break from environment practice I continued with my Queen Jadis/Narnia project! I really enjoyed the process and I'm rather pleased with my final outcome. I'm still debating whether I need to try and push my concepts further to get more strange and unique designs or whether I kept it quite reasonable to fit in the 'Narnia' universe? Still not quite sure yet.

Study

'Lexa' portrait

Changing things up again I thought I'd work on a quick portrait of a favourite character from the show 100. My work is still being successful!

Photo study

To finish up the week I did another photo study- still quite straight forward but its not trees!

I was so excited to have improved in my art I neglected to go into labs except once, where I sat there staring at 3DS max and getting grumpy. Considering my improvement, I'm feeling like my time will in fact be better spent working on my paintings and concepts rather than getting grumpy at 3D work. Although I realise its important to work on my 3D, when I'm in such a good mood for painting I don't think it should be wasted. Perhaps next week if I'm not feelin' 2D I'll work on 3D, but for now I'm just enjoying life non-art blocked.

First week without uni

This first week in which we have technically been set free from game art (although technically still sorta not) has been a bit of a shambles.

I went home for a long weekend after the final hand in and came back on Tuesday, completely out of the swing of things; without the structure of lessons and lectures I didn't know what day it was or what I should really be doing. I knew there were things I wanted to do but I was severely lacking in motivation which ended up in a mighty fine art block.

Fortunately, I managed to kind of try and get over it and force myself to do other productive things like re-organise all my social media things:

https://twitter.com/HazelTheHobbit
http://hazelbrown-art.blogspot.co.uk/
http://hazelthehobbit.deviantart.com/
https://www.artstation.com/artist/hazelthehobbit
https://www.pinterest.com/hazelthehobbit/

I just wanted to clear things up a bit and make things such as my twitter a little LESS personal. 

Once I'd done this I decided to re-do one of my old studies that I did at the beginning of the (academic) year. 

September 2014

April 2015

 It was incredibly motivating and also interesting to see the areas I improved on; I actually used my original line sketch and changed it a little around the waist and voila! In colour too!

As I mentioned last week I started dabbling in a Narnia personal project and I managed to do a little bit of work on that too: 

(Preview)

For the rest of the week I think I'm gonna allow myself a bit of time off watching films and playing games and then I'll finally get myself going into labs again to re-do some of my projects from this first year. Exciting stuff!

Week 27: Final hand in- success!

Final zombie truck

So this week marks our technically final week of first year game art! It's been emotional. And fast.
I'll cover this week firstly and then go into more depth on the year later.

The second part of our Toyota project was to produce additional zombie modifications. I'm really not sure whether I struggled with this project because it was the last of the year and I'd ran out of energy or whether it's because its so far out of my comfort zone orrrr whether because I just don't like cars.

Wireframe

Either way, I think I enjoyed this project the least. By far.

"Overall I’m not very pleased with my final model. I can’t really say I enjoyed this project, I think it’s been very far from my comfort zone.

Since there was other work set during this project I ended up leaving it quite late and didn’t spend a lot of time on it, but I do feel even if I spent more time I would have arrived at a similar model.

After hand painting textures for quite a lot of projects changing back to photo textures was quite hard for me to adjust to and I think my work is hindered because of my lack of practice.

I also feel like my final design may have been a little ambitious- I was stuck between doing something quite boring and something a little ‘cooler’. Except all the cooler things are a lot harder to model, especially when you have to consider how they’d work."

I don't really think this is the cherry on the cake for all that I've learned, and I find that incredibly frustrating.

Overall, the year has been fantastic though. I've learned so many things and feel like I've really progressed and improved. Fortunately university has fueled my desire to learn rather than make me lazy, which I'm incredibly proud of!

 

During this last week (as a treat to myself) I attempted an illustration for 'The Magician's Nephew'- the first in the Narnia series. I really enjoyed painting it and it saved me having to come up with an idea for a painting from scratch which usually put me off doing my own personal concepts. I definitely intend to keep doing things like this and summer is the perfect oppourtunity! 

I'm going to hopefully keep in the habit of posting weekly throughout the summer so don't go anywhere!

Character project post-mortem

For this project we had 5 weeks to concept, model, texture and rig a low-poly character to fit into the village level. We needed to use ourselves as reference and follow the style guide to create a character in our likeness. We had a tri-limit of 4500 with the 500 being for props, two 32bit 1024x1024 texture sheets and a 512x512 for accessories. I decided to do a mayor’s wife initially but later changed it to daughter.

There are quite a few things I feel worked well such as:

The final design: It took a long time to reach the final design because I needed to change a lot of things; I started very early on and did a lot of concepts looking at quite rich dresses since the Mayor was going to be rich. I did a lot of development on these designs but later on found that I had restricted my ideas quite early on and hadn’t really explored enough. This resulted in quite a boring design. I received some feedback and decided to take my designs back to basics again and start pretty much from scratch. With the advice I had been given I was able to create a much more interesting idea that I really liked. 

 

My final concept

Texturing: I really enjoyed the hand-painting process and felt like I made it look nice as well as fitting it into the style guide.  I really liked the way I painted the folds into my fabric making it look a lot more detailed than it is.

Finished model

Style guide: I feel like I managed to keep my design and model within the style guide. I was a little concerned about the colours of the dress but I think they still work okay. My character looks positive and cheery and has just enough stylisation to fit into the level.

The face: I’m really pleased with the way the face unwrapped and how I textured it- there were no awful warpings or seams.

The flowers alpha: Although its only a small addition I’m really happy with the flower alpha that I made for her hair.

In quite a late stage of concepting I decided to change my concept idea because it wasn’t going in the direction I wanted it to and I’d received some good feedback on what needed changing. I feel like I essentially wasted a lot of time because I ditched a lot of concepts but I did learn a lot from it. 

Some early concepts that I ended up having to ditch.

What I would do differently:

Neater topology: I feel like I could have used my topology more effectively and therefore made it neater because I think it’s a little messy; this gave me a few troubles later on when it came to unwrapping.

Better rigging: My rigging was a bit of a shambles because I didn’t understand it very well and hadn’t left myself enough time at the end to properly learn and understand it.

To conclude, there are certain things that I would start, keep and stop doing from this project. I would:

Start: Practicing topology more- more research into the topology I’ll be creating before I start.
Keep: Time management- generally overall my time management was quite effective but there’s still room for improvement.
Stop: Being lazy and leaving things at a bad standard because I can’t be bothered to fix them (eg the lower skirt)

Week 26: Essays??? Writing????

This week has been filled mostly with presentations and writing. No pretty pictures.
Well I lie a little bit, but there has been a lot of essay writing..

Cute little Hobbit hole

In accordance with my vow to start painting more creatively and because the sun was out I painted a hobbit hole with lots of flowers.

Final concept work in progress

I also decided on a final concept (FINALLY) and should be ready to model next week.

The beginning of the week was our presentations on our 'zombie apocalypse survival plan'. My feelings about this topic aside, the presentation itself wasn't too bad. I definitely rehearsed it a lot more than my previous one so I'm guessing that's the way forwards.

I'm thoroughly pooped from writing essays this week though so this post is only going to be a short one!