6 Months on

Shades of Satan, Superman! Its already been 6 months.

Its good, and bad I feel. The course is only 6 months, and Im still in Leicester for another 3. So for the next 3 months I have to teach myself some things, and than over the summer, teach myself some more. I'd much rather be given a ton of briefs, theyre fun, I've been enjoying deadlines.
Happily enough, I met all my deadlines when they were given, sometimes weeks before the deadline, so Im not flopping about like a fish out of water trying to get everything done. Ofcorse I could go back and rework my submitions before final hand in, however theres no point turd polishing and I'd rather do a bunch of studies than finals and instead do finals of things that interest me, things I'd like to stick in a portfolio.

Anyway, have I decided what I would like to be yet? My first post I said I wanted to be a Conceptartist or a Lead Artist, but leaving myself open for change. And to be honest that hasnt changed a bit, I still am not sure what I want. I do however know I enjoy 2D art more than 3D. I do however really enjoy 3D and probably would like it just as much if i did asmuch 3D as I do 2D. So theres my biggest problem.
But now summers here, I get the same feeling I get every summer; " TIME TO DRAW, DRAW, DRAW ", all I want to do right now is draw and get better. It happens every year.

Have I improved over the past 6 months? Well lets take a look at some work from september, 2010.

The first being a Character of the week from Concept Art and the second being a still life from the first day I came here.


And recent work from 2011?

And now My bradgate final and a still life of a cola bottle.

I think I've improved a little bit in the past 6 months. Not enough though, but than again I see themost improvment in my work over the summer. So I really got to whip myself into shape.

What about my 3D work?
Cant bare to post my first model (A stupidly high polly can).

Lets just say I can make stuff now without my brain exploding.


So in total. Only a little improvment, but hey, its alot better than nothing. I've learnt alot and thats showing in my work. Just need to get rid of bagage and relearn everything again and again. Eitherway, my work load has spiked, so that must be a good thing.

The Help Clinic

A small review of my thaughts on the "clinic" we set up today.
I spoke to mike on facebook a while back, telling him that the amount of people asking for crit and tutorials has risen sharply since assessment. Usualy with comments like " I need to learn this otherwise I will fail the course.". So Mike sugested we set up a tutorial session, for some reason we called it a "clinic" as we couldnt find a better name.

Anyway, the idea was that we would ask what people were stuggeling with and get people who know how to do it to explain it.
Mike would handle 3D, going over smoothing groups, typology, unwrappping, and uv efficiancy.
I would give tips on photoshop and a over view on perspective, ramble on about crap ext.
And Alexander would give us some tips on drawing and modeling in sculpy/cley.
Oh and at the end Inez gave us a view of how she unwarped her character and painted her difuse textures.

We got a relitivly decent tern out. The biggest problem was I was relying on Thomas Krikham's laptop (which has 3dsMax and Photoshop on it with tablet), which he said he would supply. This seemed like a really good idea to me as this would force him to come to the event, esspecialy as he seems to need alot of help on a wide range of subjects. He seemd very enthusiastic about it. However he went home on Wednesday and wont be back untill next Monday. This however was not told to me, dispite me living in the same dorm rooms. Anyway, this pit fall, ment we spent the most of the morning, downloading 3DsMax. Great.

While we waited I gave a quick tutorial on how to draw bricks in perspective. Which wasnt so bad, I think people understood me that is. Kept it simple. Although because the tablet driver wasnt installed properly, i couldnt do some decent rendering of the bricks.

I learned a couple bits and bobs from Mike and found some nice new buttons to take advantage of in 3DsMax. I think how things are smoothed together was the most helpful for me at the moment.

After lunch, I think I spent an hour and a half talking about how to render in photoshop, the difference between layer masks, loading custom brushes, making them, how i worked on a still life (techkoma) and briefly about drawing metal and glass. I was really tired by the end so my explanation was bland and my example was of poorest quality. I pretty much said " Glass and metal reflects everything around it, so youre drawing a bent reflection " orsomething like that and if they wanted to know how to paint metal and glass to simply set up a still life and paint it. Its the only way I understood it after all. Me winged unreferanced metal poll was ofcorse, crap.

I think I saw a few people taking notes in places, so hopefully, it was worth it for them. I dont mind spending my time for people who show up at all. Just think that I bored them a bit.
Not to mention, the experiance was good for me talking infront of people, although I was sure I would get some confrentation when I said that there was no perspecitve in nature, its quite a bold statement, even if it is true.