Drawing Jam

     I have now begun work for the current Drawing Jam (number 73) on cghub. The challenge this time is to create my own version of the grim reaper in any kind of 2D format. The pictures below show my planning and initial work on this project so far. This will need to be finished for the 23rd April.

Initially I had planned out a completely modern version in suit with a baseball bat instead of a scythe and with a more human face, however this removed too many of the features that identified the character, hence the altered version you see now. The wide brimmed hat is inspired by Captain Barbossa's from "Pirates of the Carribean", I did however decide to leave out the giant feather.  Although the image depicts otherwise, for my final version I intend to have the head as an extremely emaciated form- as opposed to a complete skull. More work to follow.

Barbossa and his hat.

PRACTICE

     Before I started entering competitions on cghub I wanted to try my hand at a couple of pactices first, as digital ainting is something I am pretty unfamiliar with. I was advised to start buying the digital art magazine "ImagineFX". In  my first copy one of their main articles was explaining how to make a portrait style piece of work so I thought I would try this first.

      I decided to use a photo of a friend who I knew wouldn't be too offended if the end result was slighty dodgy...

      Which was probably just as well. I am aware that there is a lot wrong with this image; however it was my first time trying anything of the sort and with this in mind I think it could have been a lot worse. The main thing is that I learnt a lot from the experience and it set me up to try another.

     My next practice session was to create my own character completely from scratch. This was something I hadn't tried before with digital painting. My previous work had all been guided by images that already existed.

I started out with a quick sketch of a character idea, once I was pleased with its basic form I scanned this to my computer. (Havn't invested in photoshop yet so I am still currently using GIMP).

      The next picture is some way in to my work. I was advised beforehand to use an alternative background to white when creating my image. Something else I need to focus on is learning to work without excessive use the smudge tool. Again I have been advised that this is not the thing to do and that it would be worthwhile to practise blending technique. Otherwise I could become somewhat limited in the visual style of my work.

    This is my work in its finished state. Again it is not fantastic, especially in comparison to some of the phenominal work I have seen online. However this is the first time I have completely created something from scratch and brought it through to a completed piece, for that alone I am happy with what I have created here. Once again I have learnt a lot from this process and look forward to developing my techniques further.

Change of plans

     I know it's bad but this is gonna be another one of those update posts where I recap the last week or so. As mentioned before I had planned to enter the armed and dangerous comp ending 10th April, which required me to submit a fully sculpted and painted piece of work. Having only used Mudbox once before my handling of this task was pretty slow, and I had no experience in creating a sculpt that wasnt still in unpainted form. Therefore as the deadline grew closer I grew more apprehensive about getting this task done in time, sure enough the deadline came and went without me submitting. Whilst I definately want to get round to completing this, (digital sculpting is something that I want to be able to do with skill), I decided that if I was to enter comps with deadlines I may be better off trying out those based on 2D drawing. Futhermore digital painting was something I really wanted to get to grips with in my first year, and as yet it is not something I feel I have spent any real time focusing on. Therefore I am now a member of cghub.com where I can join their competitions, as well as posting my work.

Catching up.

     It is coming up to the end of the first week of our Easter holidays and the last seven days havn't exactly been productive. There are several aspects of my course that I am struggling with at the moment and this has made approaching some of the projects more difficult. One of the things that is bothering me most of all is the sessions we have begun to help us with digital modelling, and more specifically my lack of progress in these sessions. One of our project briefs for this term is to study the architecture within a particular game, and then create it as a digital model. To prepare us for this we are going through practice session trying to create the "companion cube" from "Portal", which should hopefully teach us the skills we need in order to create our own door/window etc. The main problem for me has been that in the last session I fell behind right at the start and was unable to catch up, making virtually no progress throughout the entire lesson. To try and make up for this I have set aside some time today in which to tackle this project and try to catch up.

     The image above is of the evasive little sod I have thus been unable to create. One of the things that held me back at the star of our second session was that my workplane images of this cube had disappeared, and I had forgotten how to get them back. To document my work today, and to help me remember these steps, I will list instructions on methods such as these which I have previously forgotten. To get this workplane image up one should: switch to orthographic view> click view> image plane> import image. Once the image is loaded up you can adjust height/width etc from the right hand side.

          I now have my work plane images in place, and can use this as a guideline for creating the other features of the cube. As you can see from the image, I have also started creating the first small extrusion on the cube. Our second session focused on shaping this extrusion so I will begin this now. After completion of this I will then be up to date with the progress of this work.



My character

     I have now come up with a rough design for the character I will be creating for the "armed and dangerous" competition. I knew I wanted a large Samoan character to fit with my tattoo design and so started out with a very basic sketch indicating the form and posture.

     From here I began to further the design, adding features such as armour. I knew a large part of my character would have a strong tribal theme so for the armour I tried to make it more mechanical, so as to contrast slightly with the rest of the character.

     I liked the idea of a more permanent armour that was fixed to the character's body, hence the metal plates are bolted to his skin. I was inspired slightly by the characters from the film series "Predator" where you see a charater that initally comes across as primal and somewhat primitive, but have at the same time been equippied with futuristic sci fi armour and weaponry. Whilst I would not consider my character's armour to be overly futuristic I still feel that it holds certain familiarities.

     With a design in place I will now begin to plan and create this character in mudbox.

Armed and Dangerous

     I am currently brainstorming for ideas of an "armed and dangerous" character. The competion rules specified that this could be taken literally ie. a strong warrior character, or this could be implied in a more humourous manner, eg. doctor with a large syringe.
     Recently I have had an interest in the type of heritage tattoos used by Samoan and Maori cultures. I decided to start off using this as a source of inspiration for a character. Deciding that one of his arms would be covered by this type of tattoo I decided to design one for myself.
                         These are the reference images I found to give me an idea for the kinds of patterns I should use

   

     This is the design that I then came up with:





      I will now be focusing on creating a character which which I can incorperate this tattoo design

Starting BA3

     Since my last post we have handed in our final work for BA2, and started our third and final projects in BA3. The first work we were given was to take part in an online competition which in someway required using some of the skills we learnt in our previous project, Three suggested competitions were
the 2D drawing challenges at CGHUB, digital sculpting at CGSOCIETY, and animation at 11SECONDCLUB. The one I was attracted to at first was the digital sculpting competition, therefore I will need to start coming up with ideas for the "Armed and Dangerous" competition.