Life drawing day 1

First day, went over measured drawing and measured the figure in heads. Sometimes this method really works for me and sometimes it stifles the 'balance' of the drawing...I need to trust in the measurements more rather than what I think 'should' be right. Construction lines for standing poses don't hurt, though its harder to do for lying down poses with foreshortening. Today I used charcoal+chalk, acrylic and ink and a stick. It actually gives loads of interesting marks and cool ink splatters. Tomorrow we're drawing a girl, its nice to have some variety in the models...and my teacher reminds me of Chris in the way that she doesn't interfere with your drawing and lets everyone get on. Most of these are 10-20 minutes, spent about an hour on the acrylic, going to try and zoom in on one area and make a nice fleshy tone tomorrow with a large brush. Also I heard there's a life drawing class every thursday at a place very near me, really cheap too, I want to go there over summer!

fresh start

I realise I've been neglecting my blog a lot recently, and it reflects on my low enthusiasm this term...I've been concentrating on the group project and seem to be in the labs more than usual, but I haven't got as much to show for it as I'd like. I've lost the idea of time management and I've been wasting days thinking I've been doing more work than I have, so its time to stop being dilusional and apathetic. I've been really distracted with pointless things this year and I will try my best to improve myself before the start of summer. In a way I'm thankful to everyone for making me realise this before it was too late.
Attending a life drawing class at Leeds Art College today and the next two days, so I will post some of the work I do.

I find it pretty painful to play ps2 games now unless its a puzzle game because the textures are so blurry! Did you know FFX is 9 years old? Its hard to believe that much time has passed since I was drawing knockoff Nomura characters in my bedroom. Anyway, emulated FFX and XII look amazing, it really shows how ahead of their time the graphics and art direction were, only it wasn't obvious at the time because of the limitations of the ps2. Maybe that was the reason it had prerendered cutscenes as well as in-game cutscenes? I didn't really like the graphics in FFX so much at the time because I was still in love with sprites and prerendered backgrounds like in ps1 era. All this 3d crap just didn't have the same charm to it. It was that time when most games looked like utter crap because 3d was fashionable and no one knew how to use it properly yet. Recently I've been playing Dragon Age a lot and made this little comparison image, using Morrigan and Lulu, because they're both spooky witchy characters who walk around in skirts made out of belts with their assets on show. They're both supposed to be beautiful, but I can't help but think Morrigan is hideous, despite being an awesome character. In concept art I prefer Morrigan's design, she looks like a witch of the wilds who makes her own clothes out of scraps, whereas Tetsuya Nomura tends to pull things out of his ass and stick belts and zippers on it to make it look cool, so Lulu looks a bit like a teenage boy fantasy who doesn't really fit into her setting at all. Why do so many people think he's a good characer designer? Also, just add glasses to Lulu and you have Bayonetta, ooops.

Morrigan probably has more tris in her face than Lulu does in her whole body, but Lulu looks exactly like her concept art and still looks fabulous 9 years on. Morrigan looks nothing like the concept art facially and there's tons of face mods for her which try and match it. Isn't that a little strange? FFX artists made the most out of what they had, I find it quite amazing. To be fair, Bioware used a facegen for all the humanoids, and it was originally meant to be played from above Baldur's Gate style. But none of the characters look anything like their concept art. Morrigan has so many polys in her face because it needed to animate way more than FFX characers did, but in prerendered scene Morrigan still looks ugly, what? [Even though I'm happy Bioware made one of these videos because hardly anyone seems to do it anymore.] I know they were going for 'realism', but its said in the game that Morrigan's supposed to be beautiful, and the artists kind of failed at that. Also, the environments are underwhelming. [Its still a really immersive game and I've lost many hours to it] Since ps1, FF has always been about graphics, and western RPGs don't really care as much. I still love those old isometric rpgs ~ graphics aren' that important to me, but from a Game Art POV its really intesting to look at the current standard. We're supposed to be making things superior to ps2, but given the same technical limitations I don't think I'd be able to make something as good as the ffx models.

Mortal Engines film adaptation??

http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/film/3184223/Peter-Jackson-to-adapt-sci-fi-series#share

Oooohhhh

Old, but oh god I really want to hate this game, Squeenix fan-pandering should have stopped working by now, I'm 20 years old jesus christ. I really want to buy this soap opera and complain about everything all the way through but secretly enjoy it. It looks so wonderfully badddddd! Also Sarah looks like one of the worst characters ever and I bet Lightning turns out to be one of those emotionless 'badass' female characters who no one can relate to, although yay female ff hero. I know they'll mess it up but I'll still buy out of curiosity. And maybe for Snow. don't judge meeee

My friend showed me this video last year and I thought it'd be super relevant to post considering the kind of thing that's been discussed lately, time management etc. It's pretty long, but the advice is really useful if you take it on board and have a lot of willpower. The part about how to deal with people who demand loads of your time when you're working was really interesting, though I personally don't feel grown-up enough to relate to things like coworkers and that type of thing, I'll definitely watch this video again before I go into that kind of environment.

Well I saw this lecture for the first time at the start of the summer break last year, and it really motivated me to work on 3d pretty much most days, and only give myself certain rewards like watching tv or playing games in the evening. At uni its been really hard to do that, especially living in a really social place I always feel very awkward about including people into the working schedule, I wouldn't want anyone to have to work around what I'm doing and for me to only talk to them when I'm not working because it feels rude to me and kind of selfish, even though its just self-discipline. There's so much persuasion not to work, so much more than there is at home considering uni is supposed to be a learning environment. Only when a deadline is approaching can I really work, because that's when everyone else is working. Though, I think I've improved a lot from year 1, I'm really motivated to get better at 3d now I have my foot in the door, it doesn't seem so impossible now that I have some clue what I'm doing. Last year I couldn't do anything, using Max isn't as much of a struggle anymore, the only bit I struggle with now is unwrapping, and that's because I have to think of the best way to do it rather than what buttons to press. Its more like certain skills I need to improve on, modelling and texturing individually rather than how to use Max as a whole.

Here's some stuff I made recently.



Bad time management with the self portrait means I haven't finished texturing yet. Took too many trips away from Leicester and wasted a lot of time, though I'm happy with how its progressing. 4th character including the man we made in the first year, I still have many many more shit character models to make before I start to get good!

Also I fixed the cataract eyes on my character, Del showed me how to do a specular properly haha. Eyes aren't really that glassy. Also the normal maps are making a weird seam down the face from some angles bahhh. Diffuse/normals/specular in this render, no lights in the scene.

Posting some of my work from year 2 so far...

My painting seems to be getting less realistic this year. Probably because I'm referencing from photos less and I feel bored of trying to do photo realistic digital painting. Its more fun to play around in Painter/photoshop cos it takes hardly any time at all to make something decent compared to using real paint, so I think you can take more time to experiment with things you usually wouldn't think to do. People can get good at digital painting very fast, just look at us second years. Everyone's really improved! Though I don't think any of this stuff is better or worse than what I did last year, I'm kind of at a loss...Though I do like my sketching better this year. Basically I learned that I want to draw/paint nature, all the time, thank god Chris makes us diversify or I wouldn't draw anything but rocks and figures.

The Masters project was fun. I wanted to do a Jenny Saville study straight away, because she's my favourite contemporary painter as of around 3 years, and my background is pretty much all modern stuff so I tried to teach myself a bit about art history. So, I like Saville's work because the subject matter of beauty/body image speaks to me and she's a little bit controversial. The technique of painting with oil on a large scale interested me because I tried it a couple of years ago, and the perspective of it really messes with your head even though my painting was only a fraction of the size of what she does, so I admire her to be able to do that

While trying to reproduce the painting 'Plan' I noticed that even though her work has a hyper-real look, the large brush strokes still only suggest detail rather than explicitly paint every skin pore and vein etc. It didn't take that long to do a relatively accurate reproduction in painter using a pastel brush, as it responds better to large strokes than oil which lags terribly. I really dislike Painter sometimes for that reason and I always go into Photoshop at the end.
So after looking what everyone else had done, I thought I hadn't really understood the task because Jenny Saville still uses a modern technique even though her work has a classical look. I wanted to paint a male nude so I was looking for a good subject and found a Neoclassicist painter Jacques-Louis David who's painted a scene of Hector's death from the Iliad. It reminded me of this scene where Hector's family see his body after Priam gets it back from Achilles and he still looks all fresh and beautiful and alive even though his body's been desecrated. I liked how Hector was basically one of the manliest and heroic characters but in this painting he kind of looks boyish and like he was a vulnerable person when living, so I imagine this is the kind of image the Gods gave his body at funeral. This painting took many more hours to reproduce than my other attempt, using the same tools in Painter. The skin has a glowing quality which is made by layering paint over and over getting lighter. There's no quick way to get the effect. When you zoom in mine looks so crude in comparison to the original even though I spent a lot of time on it. Digital painting seems totally contradictory to the old techniques because its so fast, and correcting mistakes is so easy. When painting this I started to paint over mistakes rather than erase them to get in the right frame of mind. Just building up the colours on the arm to show the muscle was a slow and tedious process and takes a lot of time to get the reward where yours starts to look a bit like the original painting. Whereas doing the Jenny Saville started to take shape within the first 10 minutes. It was really interesting to see how the work of the old masters can be replicated relatively quickly in a digital medium, these are techniques I want to apply in figurative art, in life drawing or painting texture.

For 3d work, I feel like I can actually make what I want in 3d though its still a struggle every time. Last year I couldn't do anything, but I practised over summer and made a character and vehicle which was really fun. Probably because I was making something I'd designed which I'm interested in, i.e. fashion and kitschy stuff like gypsy caravans. My aim over summer was to feel comfortable in Max by the end of it and start using zbrush/surface detail maps which I also did. By the end of year 2 I want to know what to specialize in, so I guess I should just make everything and see what I'm best at. Mortal Engines projects are really fun, but I'm rushing them because I'm so slow which makes it not as enjoyable because I don't have time to do what I want. Making the environment of the natural history museum was fun at first because it was something I'd chosen, but when I realised the scale of it, it wasn't as fun anymore and got really frustrating...Still need to finish it. The vehicle is harder because I've no real reference for it, but I wanted to see if I could make something purely from imagination and a few basic references. Have no idea if it will look good or not.