BA3a - Week 5 Summary

This week I decided to redesign the glitchy pets, because I had designed them a while ago and I think my idea of the project and the theme have both changed. Below are some sketches of their designs and colour schemes. I thought about using televisions or other electronic objects as a replacement for the heads of the pets, similar to the fashion/character design trend of having a TV as a head. People often cosplay or draw characters with TV heads:

(x)

I had never seen it on anything other than a human, so I thought I'd try it and see. I like their design so far, but I want to work further with it and make it seem more 'glitchy' with different Photoshop effects. I don't want the colours to look too muddy and dirty either, and haven't chosen a specific pet breed etc to use for the final concept for this design.

I also looked at some colour schemes for some of the monsters and mount, thinking about the glitch aesthetic and what parts of their bodies etc will glow in some form.

I liked the idea of the monster designs being quite dark with these lit up areas being the part of their bodies that are the only parts really visible perhaps? And with the mounts I like the idea of the lion having a normal coloured body with the mane being bright and vibrant in comparison. The deer will have two heads that are glitchy, and the body perhaps being a darker colour? 

I also started silhouettes for the final design, the boss. I was thinking about size when making these, as my first idea was to have a boss that felt huge as soon as you laid eyes on it. 

I also tried using liquify on Photoshop to loosen my designs up a bit, as I feel like I tend to get very detailed with the designs and spend too much time on them when I shouldn't, and these designs so far looked quite stiff.

I chose three that I liked the look of, two being from the liquified silhouette designs as they felt to me as if they had more movement and had more potential, and tried their designs out with some colour, thinking about their form and how they stick to the glitch theme. 

I like the way all three of these designs turned out, but I can only choose one so I will have to figure out which one has the most potential design wise. The top left design, the deer like monster, reminds me of those forest guardians and my eye is drawn to that. I like the idea of the deer-like antlers glowing in some form, maybe electricity. 

We also had a task this week, to make a slate textured cube in Photoshop. Below is my result.

I started off very badly with this one as I'd never done a texture cube before and had some difficulty with getting started. Once I got into it though it went well I think, though I wouldn't say it looks enough like slate to be recognisable, and the shading seems almost very pixelated without being pixels. I feel like next time I will be able to do a better job because i have learnt a lot from this task, especially as this is my first texture cube and I don't often draw slate so am not familiar with its appearance.

BA3a - Week 4 Summary

This week I continued with the mount designs. Below are some of the designs I picked that had more potential and made more detailed sketches from their silhouettes.

Many of these felt quite stiff and too much like your average animal, so I may need to push the designs further.

I then picked from them and worked on more detailed designs with some colour schemes using the glow effects on Photoshop. I like all of these so it was a challenge to pick, but I think the top two work the best as mounts. I like the idea of the bottom right one being either a monster or a boss design, as I think the colour scheme I chose is really interesting and I like the harpy design. 

I also started working on the monster designs this week, starting with silhouettes. I feel like these were difficult, as I didn't want to make designs that looked as familiar as the mounts and pets etc, as they are supposed to be scarier and fightable. Thus I was trying not to have them look much like familiar animals etc. 

After this I moved straight to making the detailed designs with the effects, because I felt that the second sheet with further details seemed pointless if I'm doing the same thing on the next drawings anyway. It saved a lot of time to just move straight to this point so i think it was a good decision. 

I think due to making so many designs I am improving a lot with each area, and these ones have ended up being some of my favourites. I thinks some of them would make good mounts/pets as well so I may have to do some redesigning and seeing what I prefer. The bottom middle canine design is one of my favourites, but I like them all a lot so I haven't quite chosen two designs quite yet. 

Our task for this week was to chose from two briefs again. I chose brief C and the model pose below.

We had to draw over the model using references for clothing from the era provided, and use the characteristics listed too. We also had to draw a background to put the character into. I made a moodboard of some clothing from the era. 

I also used this image as reference for the background, from here (x)

Below is my final drawing. I think with more time I could have done a better job, but it felt like a very rushed piece and I also often struggle with clothing and patterns. I also think I could have added more flow to the clothes working with the pose I was given, but I think I ended up making it look quite flat. I wanted the background to not take too long, as I didn't have that much time, but it may have taken away from the model drawing. All in all however I'm relatively proud of this, and the background really brought the piece together. I added an orange layer over the top to make the piece look older and similar to the images I was using as reference. 

BA3a - Week 3 Summary

With Week 3 I continued making silhouettes and making more finalized designs for each creature. In our session on Tuesdays I talked with Merlin and finally settled on an overall theme for all the designs, cyberpunk/neon glowing designs. Its similar to the idea I had in the beginning with the glowing mushroom, and cyberpunk glitch designs are something that interest me at the moment.

The drawings above were done before I had settled on my theme idea. The sheep bee was something i thought up because of the way bees are often drawn, as fluffy orange bugs, and so the combination came about. The cat idea was having it surrounded in some sort of jelly, similar to the Pokemon Solosis and its evolutions.

Solosis (x)

I redid the designs and the above ones are what I came up with so far. These ones follow the glitchy cyberpunk theme more closely, where I was experimenting with glowing layer effects on Photoshop and colour schemes that I liked. I think these might be my final pet designs, but I may work on them further and I might come up with different and better ideas when working on other areas. I feel that the cat design still needs some work. 

I also started working on the mounts, making silhouettes for them. Below are the first attempts:

I made these silhouettes, but then decided that I was using too many references and not being free enough with my drawing, so I decided to redo it and start again, using less references and more just feeling out what kind of designs i wanted for the mounts.

Above are the final silhouette designs. I'm glad I re-did some of these as I think these have more character and there are more that I can work with further and hopefully make into my final mounts. 

Our task for this week was to create either a goblin or a dwarf following the prompts below.

I started with some silhouettes, trying to make sure that her feet were prominent in her design and that she wasn't too big. I then found a design i liked and worked with it further, adding elements to the design to make it more like the prompts. These silhouettes were fun, the shape of the character was immediately something I picked up on and worked with, and I was mostly working on the clothing and hair/ears after the first silhouette. I was also told by Nigel, about 5 silhouettes in, to let them be more loose and spend less time on each one, which I feel helped me a lot in my work.

Below is the final callout sheet. I am very happy with her design and I think I showed off most of the prompts pretty well. I think if I redid it with more time I would make the feet larger, and allow her foolish nature to come out more in the final drawing. The colour scheme of this piece is something I am very proud of, and she is a character I would be happy to work with again.

BA3a - Week 2 Summary

This week started with the presentation, which went well and it seemed like I had set myself a good amount of work to do, plus the stretch goal if I use my time well. I then started researching and silhouetting my pet designs. MMO games often have very varied designs for things like pets and mounts, as they want to cater to everyone's needs and they don't have to actually make sense in the lore or logic a lot of the time. For example in FFXIV you can get things like a baby chocobo as a pet, and a fat chocobo as a mount, and also get a tiny boat as a pet and a throne to fly around in. I think that's why I wanted to focus on MMO game creatures because they can just be designed for fun.

Below are the silhouettes made for the pets:

Some are inspired by real animals, others by other things like food or toys, and others are just what came to mind when sketching. I then picked some of my favourites and drew them more detailed as seen below:

With these I'm going to narrow it down and then pick two from them. I somewhat regret doing it like this as its a very slow process, and with the mounts/monsters I will try to do it differently. There are a couple from these designs that I think would make good mounts so I might play around with them.

We also had our first session with Kaleigh working in Alchemy and Photoshop. We first had to make an environment using Alchemy, and then we brought it into Photoshop and used photobashing and layer masks to create an environment piece from it. Below is my attempt:

I had some issues with my tablet in this session as the older wacom drivers seem to have stopped working, so most of this piece was done using a mouse. I think if I was able to use my tablet for this, it would have turned out significantly better, but with what little time had plus using a mouse for almost all of it, I am relatively happy with the outcome. If I had more time I would have used more photos and drawn more, working with the colours too as a lot of the rocks look terribly out of place.

BA3a - Week 1 Summary

This week was the first week back in our course, and our final year. We were told the course structure and what our task is for the next three months. I decided to move over to concept art this year because I think I can do a lot more in that area and push my skills. We were told that we have to make a Powerpoint presentation and pitch our ideas to see if the tutors think we can achieve it in the time set out. 

My first idea for the three month project was cyberpunk inspired environment design of this idea I had of a place where the sun had died out or something similar, and big mushrooms had popped up that produce heat/light as a replacement. I had made a couple of designs for this idea too.

I wanted to do this because I'm not particularly familiar with environment design, but I decided it was too much of a big idea to do for this project, especially as I'm not skilled in that area. My final idea is 2D creature design looking at mounts, pets and monsters. This idea is inspired by MMOs like Final Fantasy XIV or old ones I've played as a kid like Maplestory or Dofus. I've always been a big fan of the mounts and pets in MMOs but they're often in games that are Pay 2 Play or have microtransactions so I ended up admiring them from afar. In general games with animals/pets etc have always been on my radar, and I'm doing a similar subject in my essay, so I thought it'd be a fun area to explore and I've not really done any specific creature design in the course yet so it will be good to work on my skills. 

Below is my PowerPoint:

It shows what I'm aiming to achieve, and a 'time stretch goal' where if I have time I will be able to design some animations for the characters. The second page has a rough timetable which will hopefully help me organize my time better.

I also went to life drawing this week, and below are the two studies I made. I haven't done life drawing in a while so they're not my best work, but hopefully if I try to go every couple of weeks I'll pick it back up and feel more confident in my skills and anatomy.