Final Dance

The biggest news I have is that my thesis is officially over! Things turned out better than I expected and I received an A for the overall project and results. I posted the final shots I have of what the level looks like in the UDK engine on my thesis blog, but I'll repost my favorites here as well.

I've still got some polishing left to do, but overall I am very happy with it!

I've also got some final projects and results from my Lighting and glass class to share.

For lighting I decided to create the storage room for a theater company. As usual, my plans were much more elaborate but time forced me to scale them back. I wanted much more dirt, dust, and maybe even cobwebs, but it's important to recognize when you need to scale back and sometimes you just can't do it all. I'm still very happy with it despite not having everything I wanted.

I collect glass paperweights, so whenever I could pick what to make in my glass class I decided to make them. I actually ended up only making one cup because I didn't find it as cool or exciting.

My first one turned out a little derpy because it was the first thing I made in the hot shop. I had a lot of trouble keeping it on center because keeping the pipe turning at an even and constant rate was difficult with my tendonitis. As a result the top of my paperweight ended up being lopsided.

My second one turned out much better and my teacher let me experiment with rolling the glass into a cone-like shape.

My third paper weight is one of my favorites because of the colors and how the design on the inside turned out. We used a speciall type of blue color that reacts when mixed with other colors, so I ended up with some really pretty white speckles and swirls where it reacted with the purple color. The big silver thing in the middle is actually a giant bubble, and it's really cool because on one side of the globe the color swirls up and kind of hides it. The pictures don't really do it justice.

I don't have photos of the final paper weight I made yet, but it was very fun to make because my teacher let me experiment again with cutting a flower into the colored glass in the center. I also got to use a special crimp on the flower's petals so when I covered it with the clear glass all these tiny bubbles formed from the air being trapped in the grooves on the pedals.

And of course as usual I have a plethora of other drawins I've done in my brief momments of free time to help me relax and just take a break.

I actually spent quite a bit of time on this one, I revisited it several times before I was actually happy with it. The main thing to know about this one is that the female is real, as in she's part of reality. Whereas the mail is more a part of her thoughts and feelings. The whole idea is that she constantly struggling with her emotions and no matter how hard she tries to move on and get past them, they are there toying with her in this endless dance.

 I really like this one design wise, although I'm not entirely convinced I haven't seen it or something similar somewhere.

 I'd like to actually finish this one someday, although I don't really have any plans set in stone for it.

 A quick painting I did. Didn't spend too much time on it, just needed to let off some steam.

I liked this one at first, but now I don't. I think it's the facial structure that bothers me. I didn't really spend a lot of time planning it or making sure it was correct.

Just another drawing where I was playing around with design ideas and photoshop.

Smorgasbord!

~Please be aware that this blog post includes some drawings that display artistic nudity. The last section of the post includes drawings from a Life Drawing Class.~

Update time! Finally! I know it's been such a long time since my last update. I was actually hoping to have this done before Christmas, but I got very sick the week just before vacation and was out of commission for about 10 days.
The good news is, because it's been so long, the number of drawing and random doodles that I have to share has really piled up so prepare for lots of new pictures!

I'm going to start with the best, a disney-ish illustration that I've almost finished. The style is very, very different for me, but I think that's part of what made it fun. It really started as an exploratory sketch that turned into a sort of self-challenge to see if I could actually pull it off. It's one thing to do this as a line drawing, but I don't have a lot of experience when it comes to actually coloring my drawings-which is why I've been trying to practice it.

 Overall I'm considering it a huge success, although I would like to adjust how the blanket is being held up because it doesn't really make sense for how she is gripping it. I'll probably put this one in my portfolio, since a lot of companies like to see that you can draw and in multiple styles. Like I've said it's so different from my usual style, so I think it will really stand out as a good representation of how versatile I can be.

And now for something completely different...
I've been taking a glass class this quarter, and these were my first attempts at sculptural beads (sorry for the less than great photo, I was in a hurry to take it before I left for vacation).

 I'm very proud of them. They aren't master pieces, but for my first try I think they turned out pretty good. From Left to right: Navi from Legend of Zelda, a Guinea Pig, some angry birds, a fish, and some yoshi eggs.

I have a lot of doodles and quick drawings that have accumulated over the past several weeks.  All of these were done for the sake of doing art and just taking some time to relax from all my crazy thesis work.

 The other day I felt like I really needed to just set my mind free. The image of some one with wings on their head is definitely lacking originality on my part, but for a quick drawing I really love the way the wings came out. Plus, when something's for fun, who cares if it's original? I had a lot of fun with this drawing and that's what matters.

 Not much to say about this one other than that the first thing I did was scribble on the page and then decided the scribble looked like and eye- which led to me creating the rest of the picture.

 I did this in about 5 minutes, but I absolutely love it. I kind of wish it was an actual water color and not a digital piece.

Again not much to say. I like it, I wish the perspective on the elbow coming forward had turned out right. I managed to do an okay job of faking it, but it stands out enough to bother me every time I look at it.

This one was supposed to be in my last post, but I couldn't find the file at the time.

Again, just trying something different for the sake of it. I really like this style and I want to keep playing around with it when I get some more time.

Alright, all that's left are the photos I took of some of my drawings from the Life Drawing class I took last semester.

Marker and Conte Crayon. I loved trying out different materials, and more specifically mixing different ones together. The photo/computer doesn't give a good sense of it, but I really loved the texture I got from putting the white conte crayon over the marker.

I found I enjoy drawing muscular people best, for some reason I have a much easier time re-interpreting what I see on to paper when they are. However, I really think this one turned out nice, even though I had a hard time getting the right shapes at first.

I need to re-photograph this one. This is one of my favorites because unlike most of my drawings I actually kept my pencil strokes nice and neat and it turned really great because of that.

In my defense, the reason I end up getting messy is because I have tendonitus in my hand/wrist/elbow/shoulder, and it's usually hard for me to control the pencil for small/fine details. I found that accepting the messiness and learning how to use it to my advantage tends to work better than trying to fight it.

I have the same feelings about this one. It needs to be rephotographed and I love the pencil strokes I used to shade it. I did my best to clean it up well enough to share now since I have no idea when I'll get around to photographing it again.

Whew, that was a really long update! I'm done for now, and hopefully it won't be so long before I'm back for the next post. As always, please feel free to leave feedback, ask questions, or anything else along those lines.

Life Size

It's officially mid terms which means of course that the quarter is in full swing for me. I've been running around between all my different projects and my two jobs so things for the blog are naturally off schedule. I'd like to say that I can get back to weekly posts, but I don't foresee that being realistic any time soon. Nonetheless, I will be doing my best to update as often as possible.

I had a rather exciting last two-weeks art wise. I got to do my first ever life-sized figure drawing which was also live (meaning in person from a model), which was the most fun I have had drawing in a long time. 

I knew I wouldn't have enough time to shade the whole thing supper neatly and perfectly so I decided to just have fun with the materials instead. I end up doing a ton of smearing with my hands just whenever I felt like it. I then kept some of my shading untouched so that the strokes were still clearly visible and in the end it came out with a cool mixture of both.

 I am over all extremely happy with it, except I think the shoulder area and back of her kneck is not quite right. Unfortunately, that's because my view changed a little bit after the model too her first break and that was the one area I hadn't clearly mapped out in the first 30 minutes. There are a few other minor issues, but I am still extremely happy with it. It's also really cool to have a drawing that's literally as tall as I am.

 I've been working on creating a self portrait in 3D for my Modeling Strategies Class, and I've been having a lot of fun.

On the Left is the photo I took of myself. Since I'm not doing details just yet I decided to go ahead and mirror my face and work from it like that. Once I get closer to the end I can switch to working asymetrically, since no one's face it's perfectly symetrical. 

I think my profile view isn't as strong in terms of the accuracy of the model, but this has only been the first week so there is plenty of time to make adjustments. I'll be spending a lot of time fixing the nose which is almost entirely wrong in terms of shape. And I need to work on getting my cheek's bone structure right, it's a little more fleshy (for lack of a better word) than how I have it on the model at the moment.  I haven't touched the eyes at all so they are off in both the front and side views. 

I also started a new digital painting that will mostly likely end up on my never ending pile of unfinished work. In terms of time and access to the right tablets, it usually just isn't realistic for me to even be starting these, but it is something I really do want to get better at. The only way to get better is to practice, so I try and fit it in when I can.

NA big difference here though is that unlike most of my other digital drawings I started this one from a sketch I did in pencil. I'm much more comfortable and better at drawing characters from scratch in pencil. I have improved at it on the tablet, but I think it'll be a long time before I can surpass anything I can do on paper just because I have so many more years of experience with paper. It's turning out pretty well, I think her waist/hips might be a bit small for her upper body, but that's easily adjustable. I like how the fans turned out, although I'm not too sure about how convincing their angles are. We'll have to wait and see how this one turns out.

The rest of what I have this week are mostly just doodles.

I've been getting back to drawing in pencil, I think drawings done on paper always have so much more life to them than ones done digitally- at least in the case of my own work. He's unfinished as I'm still trying to visualize what he's wearing. I pretty much had the idea of the wolf hat (unoriginal, i know) and drew him because I wanted to draw that, but now I don't know what to do with the rest.

This is a Drawing I did of my friend Ben really quick. I like it because it looks exactly like him. 

And finally, whatever this thing is. Don't ask because I really don't know.

Catching Up To Summer

Now that I'm back and ready to roll, I thought it would be nice to take a moment and post all the stuff I did over the summer. Although I was mostly busy, I did find time to fit in some artsy things every here and there.

But first, I should also mention that I did hear back about the Girl Gamers In Real Life Scholarship

Competition, unfortunately, I did not win. But that's okay, I had a lot of fun participating and the overall experience was worth it. I'm still excited to have made it to being a semi-finalist, even if I didn't win. 

Something I spent quite a bit of time on this summer was preparing for my senior thesis. I did a lot of conceptual work, mostly with quick models in Maya. 

But before I get to what I did for it over the summer, I want to mention that I am keeping a separate blog of my progress which I will be updating each week. I added a tab at the top of the page that will give easy access to anyone who's interested in following it.

That being said, I expect to be very busy with my thesis this school year, so if there's ever a week that I can't update this blog, you can check my thesis one and still see what I've been up to. I'm working two jobs on the side of school this year as well, so there's a good chance I may have to change from my weekly posts to something less frequent.

Anyways, back to the art!

As I mentioned earlier, I did a lot of conceptual modeling for my thesis, but even before that I did some experimenting in Zbrush to help me decided whether or not I wanted to go for project focused on characters or on environments.

This summer was the first time I ever got to use Zbrush, so of course I started off with some online tutorials and just playing around. My goal was to learn the basic tools and just get a feel for the program overall. So I ended up making a face from a simple sphere shape as I watched the tutorials on the different tools and tested them out.

I only had enough time to try it out for an hour when I did this, but for my first try I was pretty happy with the face I managed to sculpt into the sphere.

I felt comfortable enough to the program to decided to sculpt off of a base mesh, so I spent an hour of free time every couple of days making a bust for me to sculpt off of.

But by the time I finished and found time to work again I had decided to go with environments for my thesis and abandoned the bust for another time.

 When it comes to characters I prefer to draw rather than model in regards to conceptualizing, but I found that since I have less experience drawing architecture it was much easier and faster to model the concepts than it was to draw them. 

This was my first scene that I created in roughly 8 hours to help me visually create a style that was cohesive.
A good example of this is how I changed the bridge in the top image to the one on the bottom because I realized the first one felt too big and bulky and just didn't fit in with the rest of the scene. I was planning on remaking this scene for my thesis with better models (these were mostly just blocks that I quickly adjusted to get the look I wanted, so model-wise they are not something I would actually want to re-use), but then I realized the number of models and textures I would have to produce would just be far too much for me to actually finish in time. So instead I'm using this has a sort of style guide/inspiration for a smaller scene with the same idea. All of which you can read more about here.

After spending about two months working on my thesis whenever I had time, I decided one night to do something different and picked up that bust I had made earlier. I brought it into Zbrush and just started playing around. I didn't really have an end vision or goal, I just wanted to see what I could come up with.

I ended up making her into some sort of alien species. Again, there was no real goal other than to just have fun, and I think I spent maybe 2 hours on it.

The rest of the stuff I did consisted mainly of sketches, so there's not much to talk about. I just did them for fun.

I have another one somewhere that I'll have to find and post. I know I scanned it, but I'm not sure where I saved it to on my computer.

Fishes are so Delicious

I have quite a few updates and new things to share. Let's start with the updates on projects from my last post.

First of all I completely redesigned the character I am making for my project pipeline class. I realized that I didn't have a clear idea of who my character was and it was really holding me back in terms of being able to let her inner personality show through in my work.

I'm really glad I decided to rework the design. Going back and doing thumbnails really showed that I didn't have a style really nailed down, and even as I started to form a better image of my character in my head it still took me several tried before things started to become more consistent.

She's still very simple design-wise. I mentioned last time that I really wanted to keep the design conservative so that I could really focus more on building my skills instead of spending time making everything really complex. My professor pointed out that something I should really work on is trying to make a unique profile for her so that she's more identifiable. While I was purposefully being conservative, I think my professor was bring up a really important issue. Right now she doesn't really stand out at all, and if I can find a way to change that while still keeping her simple I think it would







I spent a lot of time playing around with hair styles. I knew I wanted her to be a more butch and serious looking female, but being a girl myself, I know how many different things can be down with hair. There is no such thing as just "short hair," there are hundreds of different styles and types of short hair.  But there are ways to limit options, luckily, and since I wanted her to feel more professional and serious and it was pretty clear that anything too wild or messy would send the opposite message. Not only is she a professional, but she's also very rational. I decided she's the type to keep her hair short not because it looks good but because it keeps it from interfering with her work as a soldier. really help.

With all of this in mind, I've decided to go with hair style number 2. My second choice would be number 6. I'm going to begin modeling her today so I should have more to share next time.

Now on to rendering!  I finished my last project. It's not too different from the image I posted last week, but the lights are better and there's some AO in the picture too.  It's still not the most exciting thing I've ever done, but it's not too bad.

I've also begun my second project for rendering in which we have to make an image using only procedural shaders. I decided I really wanted to challenge myself for this one, and boy did I pick a challenge. I decided to make a gold fish, which doesn't sound too bad but if you've ever had to make scales using procedural texturing then you'd know it's no picnic.

It took me three hours to get just the shape of the scales alone. It took me a while but I finally managed to get the shape using just ramps. I then added a bump map, color, incandescence, and some other attributes. In the end I used mostly ramps for a good portion of the entire shader.

The next challenge was getting the texture for the fins, particularly the tail since the lines need to follow along the split "Y" shape of the tail.

They're still not perfect, but I need to work on finishing the rest of the scene and the eye before I play with them some more. It's due on Tuesday, so I should have a finished image to share next week.

Before I go, remember the doctor concept I created in my post The Doctor is In? Well I'll be using him for my next rendering assignment, so make sure to check back to find out how he turns out!