CV

Recently i have been doing a lot of work into my CV, i have also consulted the Careers adviser at the art school who i found very helpful. Today i had a two hour lecture on interview practice which i found helpful. It told me how i should conduct myself in an interview, using body language and how to get around difficult questions which may be asked of me by sadistic employers.

I have also showed him a copy of my CV which i have had feedback on to help me improve it.

Alterations2

I have been continuing going through my files to improve my concept pieces. Here i have my 'Swoosh' Painting after i have come back to it.
There is a mist making the background more out of focus and concentrating the viewer's attention on the foreground and on the airship. I have also made the smoke look a bit better and expanded the right and left sides a bit, i have made the airship more lighter in shade, using a yellow glow to reflect the light of the setting sun behind the viewer. Finally i re sized it to the format requested for the exhibition by the course leader.
Again i have resized this image to fit the requirements and i have made the background a lot more out of focus. I have also used the blend tool a lot on the sky to give it a more 'evening haze' kind of a look.
And finally here i have also given the background a slight blur (Getting more blurred towards the center) to bring out the character in the foreground. I have also made the shadows a bit more realistic, getting less sharp the further from the light source they get.

Alterations.

Lately i have been going through the paintings i have already done and have been trying to lok for errors and/or ways to improve upon what i have already done, and i have found many finishing touches i can add.I have changed a great deal of this piece. I have made some of the buildings seem less uniform for starters, as well and making a smoke trail where the airship is going.
Here i made a simple blue background for the outside world through the backdoor as well as redoing all the faces on all the characters (Which you can't see in this picture with this resolution) I also put two more fans above the band to help with composition.
And finally i finished this orthographic of my boat, including annotations about how the ship works to make it look more like a set of plans for the building of the ship and thus makes it look a lot more professional. The font however may be a little bit difficult to read, so i should include a translated version.

Portraiture

Okay, so i have my character design ready, now it is just a case of painting him into my previous concept art piece . I am not using a model to paint over the top this time, i think i know the shape i want him to take, it will feel more natural also to paint him into the scene instead of placing a model on top of the scene as i feel it will blend in to the perspective a lot more. I had to choose a pose for him, one that showed his character, so i painted him drinking a bottle of wine.
I am a little concerned about some of the shadows in the background and hope to get some help with that soon.

Swoosh!

After the sunset, i decided to make another painting showing the airship coming in to land. It flies in over the city below and hits a tower. I have called it 'Swoosh' as an onomatopoeia word describing the ship flying past. I made a simple model on silo of the city where you can see the harbor in the distance. It is supposed to take place a couple of minutes after the sunset picture and should be considered an extension of that one.
As you can see it carries on a few of the themes of the previous painting such as the colour scheme and the light source, despite being from another angle. I have also made the sky slightly less colourful as the sun would have gone down a bit more since the previous image which was a few minutes earlier. I have allways liked the idea of making my own comic book and so if i had a little more time i would have maybe made a few more like this one to show what happens next.

What a character!

While i was making the sunset piece, i was also working on some character designs for the pilot of the airship, whther or not this is the protagonist or antagonist or whether he is important or not i am unclear about. I just thought, Sky pirate, Indian and culturally mixed as he travels around a lot.

I made a line up of potential characters and chose elements i like from bits of them. and finalised a simple orthographic .He is based on some of the things i like about my lineup of possible character, the trench coat makes him look a bit like a cowboy, which goes with the fairly simple style underneath. I believe i have yet to outfit him with jewelry, which would be essential for any self respecting pirate captain just returning from Thailand with a cargo of stolen goods.

sunset painting

I have recently been working on this painting of my airship flying into a harbor against a sunset. I used my model a little bit to get a sense of lighting for the airship but the sky, horizon and sea i made myself on Painter. I learned a lot about colour as i tried to keep the pallette limited to a few browns and purples and oranges.

making models and painting over the tp of them.

Again i am working on two pieces at the same time, i have been using the 3d models as a basis to get the shadows and the perspective right as that seemed to work wuite well with the previous one. My idea is to include a character on my boat deck painting so i have done some character designs to work on my strength as i have been told i feel great empathy with the characters i design
. I watched a Gnomon workshop DVD by BaRonTIerI about character design and so i made a 'line up' of characters on Silo and rendered them to be painted over


While i was doing this, i also made a quick model of my ship on Silo and rendered in on Maya, i then took it into painter where i proceded to paint it in perspective based on another Gnomon workshop dvd i saw by Ryan Church. I had a specific light source in mind for my next painting. I put this perspective painting into my previous painting on the orthographic of the boat designs before hand, then i proceded to paint a nice landscape for my boat to exist in.

Interior design

I used a combination of Painter and Photoshop to paint my room as i had stated in my learning agreement that i would rely more on other programs, however the comuters in the studio do not have painter so i had to make do with what they had. I drew a lot from the Indian Style book i had from the first term. I wanted a lot of colours, especially for the band where i wanted the viewer to be drawn to first.
So this is the image i made. The 3d model i made helped a lot with the perspective and the lighting, however, the faces were a problem. I did the whole image in the wrong resolution, the resolution was far too low for me to get the faces right. I used the image of Rama i used as a framed picture as a reference for the faces. Unfortunately there seems to be an uploading error everytime i try to upload the next image so i will have to come back to this later.

Room

Next i had an idea for a way to get character, props and environment design all in one, I would make a room full of people interacting with objects. It was a great way to explore perspective and more importantly try out a new strategy i had in mind to help with the perspective. While painting the ship deck painting i thought it would save a lot of time if i simply made a model of my ship and had the perspective worked out for me allready, so instead of spending hours drawing lines across my canvas i made up my room in the Silo program where i spent two days extruding polygons to the shape i wanted for my room. I even made some simple human figure shapes to go in the picture.

I then uploaded it into Maya where i was able to add lighting effects to get the lighting right for my painting. With a chandalier in the middle of the room i decided to use that as the light source and painted the shadows in around it.

Boatings

So i proceded to paint my designs. The Orthographic i did mostly when i was at home with my family on Photoshop, largely from my imagination and from a wooden board texture i found instantly on Google for the wood, and a canvas texture for the zeppelins.
I then used an old paper texture for the background, the one i used for the logo of my project and gave it a nice border which i feel presented it in a very nice way, making it look like a design document from the time it came from. My next aim is to get a painting of the ship in perspective for the bottom left hand corner and write some notes about the design of the ship in caligraphy around the designs.

The other image i was working on at the same time i did mostly after the Easter break as the vanishing point tool stopped working on my parent's computer. I used some of the same textures for it as the image i was working on at the same time.
I came back to this one later to add shadows lighting and even characters to give the image more atmosphere. I was also a bit concerned that it seemed a very brown afair with very little other colour. Blue and brown seems like a trend that has been used again and again in most of my works this term so i had in mind a background which shows the sea, the sky and the horizon the ship is sailing towards.
I added this background and a person and a lot of light and shadows and i believe the results are a lot better as the result.
My next idea is to put my character design idea in the foreground of the piece to mask the are in the bottom right where not a lot is going on . Overall i beleive this piece to be quite effective with the shadows.

What heppened next?

I was then stuck about what to do next, i had my heart set on an airship which my character would use to do piracy with, this was during the Easter break when i was at home with my family. I don't normally work very well under those conditions as i don't like to be disturbed while i work, but i kept going with it anyway.

I started two paintings at the same time, but as they both related to each other i think it worked quite well and it kept me going, stopped me from slacking and wondering what to do next. I wanted to do this ship from two very different angles, one from on the deck and a well presented orthographic painting. Before i started however i did a bit of research into oriental boats to give me an idea of how to integrate a sense of the exotic into my design, so i looked at dhows, Baghlahs and Chinese junks. The arabic Dhow style would have been most commonly used in the ports of india at the time, and pretty much used all over the Indian ocean.
I didn't feel i needed to make a lot of thumbnails for the design of my ship, i did a couple in my sketch book before deciding on one i liked from what i didn't like from all the ones i drew, a small and light one, i had a choice between an airship and a sea ship, so i decided, why not both!

My idea is a small dhow with a few zepelins and two fold out wings to help it into the air, it can take off vertically like a hot air balloon or it can take a run up, just like a Harrier Jump Jet.

the next term.

Yeah it is a bit late to update only now, but i will continue posting these from now on. I have been working very hard recently, which is a releif as i was struggling a lot earlier in the term, which is why i didn't post a blog for a long time. I was unsure about where to take my project next as my research was all very broad and could have taken down many different paths. I wanted to do character design as empathy seems to be one of my biggest strengths, but also wanted to do other things related to the steam punk genre, robots, props and ships which i feel i didn't do enough work into last year.

I started work at first on landscape, not knowing where i wanted to go with it, i tried experimenting with various urban perspective pieces, drawing from the landscapes i had collected in my research stage, so i started work on a cityscape, initially displeased with it because i had no idea where i wanted to go with it, after one tutorial however, i learned about a briliant technique where photoshop works out the perspective for me, saving a lot of time.
I added the people because my image initially looked a bit like a ghost town. i needed the crowd to add a bit more life to the piece, i added the elephant to relate it back to my previous work. The way no one seems to notice it hints at these being all over India in the time my game is set and people are used to seeing them. Now that i post it up here and read what i put i notice a small number of faults with the piece that i will have to rectify very soon. One of these faults is that i think it is too colourful, therefore it is too 'In your face' and hard to concentrate on one thing or the other.
Here i have saturated it, removed all colour and given it a sepia overlay which make it resemble the photographs i collected erlier, it is more effective as it attracts attention towards the elephant more and it is quite dark against the more hazy buildings towwards the background.