Visual Art:
Starting life drawing has been wonderful for me as I absolutely love it, it was most likely what got me onto this course in the first place so doing it again has been a joy. I've started using charcoal and chalk for the first time properly, which I've hated in the past but think I am finally getting used to now and I have a fun time using it to shade.
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| Charcoal and chalk on mid-tone paper |
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| Quick pencil sketches |
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| Charcoal on white paper |
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| Using a rubber on white paper covered with charcoal |
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| Charcoal drawings |
We also did some contour drawings, first of still life, which I did of people I saw whilst in Costa.
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| A few of the contour drawings from Costa |
The week after that we did some contour drawings of street scenes around Leicester and then did an ink wash of them using Indian Ink. I think these were both a lot of fun, I've never done ink washes before but it was pretty simple to pick up and really brought life to my contour drawings!
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| One of my ink wash pictures in the Leicester market |
After that we started on a vehicle design project. This really intimidated me at first since I have so much trouble drawing vehicles and the first vehicle I designed The Albatross, a battleship based off birds I didn't much like.
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| My first vehicle, The Albatross |
So I went back and did a new design of a futuristic flying suit for two people connected through breather tubes on their masks and I liked this design a lot more.
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| My second vehicle, the Dragon Fly-Suit |
We then had to make presentation boards to sell the vehicle, I did a detailed one describing how the suit worked and a more propaganda styled one as it is meant to be used by the military.
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| The detailed presentation board |
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| The propaganda presentation board |
Finally, the last thing we had to do was make a model of our vehicle so I bought a Barbie doll from the £1 store and modeled my suit over it using Fimo Clay. It took longer than I expected because I had to do a lot of waiting for the clay, paint and glue to dry but I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, the only thing I don't like is the felt on the wings since I couldn't get it to stick in the style it's meant to be and also I ran out of felt so just had to make do with what I had.
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| My model of the Dragon Fly-Suit |
3D Game Production
We've only had one project handed in thus far in this term and that was to model a Ford Transit van. I found this quite boring as vans aren't very interesting and the modelling took me way longer than I had wanted it to as I had a lot of trouble with the front of the van but I learnt a lot of new skills to use in 3DS Max during this project which have made me understand everything better for example, I learnt that by creating planes and then holding shift and dragging them allowed you to create new planes coming off the original plane, a brilliant feature that without it I wouldn't have been able to model my van as well as I managed to and also by hitting the enter key with the selected faces you want to unwrap during the unwrapping process maps out everything for you smoothly, something that would have helped me greatly because of my terrible unwrapping last term. So even though the project was boring, I'm glad we did it because I learnt these new skills.
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| Final renders of the transit van |
We are now currently almost 2 weeks into out month-long second project of the term which is our first character project! We have to model a gladiator which should be interesting, I'm almost finished with the model of mine, I just want to add some more clothes to him and give him a weapon. We also have to use pelt mapping to unwrap these which we have yet to learn so that should be interesting. This was my first attempt at my gladiator's face, something which scared me greatly as well as scaring a number of other people so enjoy it!
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| Some scary face modelling |
Critical Studies
So far critical studies this term has all been about presentations, which is why I've been so quiet on my blog! We had to write a review on a game of our choice and then make a presentation and present it to the rest of our groups. I chose Fallout 3 and did a very long review on it (because I love it so much!) so when it came to condensing it into a powerpoint I had a lot of trouble. The first time I presented I'll admit that I didn't practice it at all and it was pretty much thrown together at the last minute (sorry Mike!) I didn't pass the first presentation as I ran over the five minute time, had way too much text and not enough images, sat down instead of standing up and didn't look at my audience. I couldn't afford to fail the second time we redid this presentation so I fixed mine up, taking out all of the text and putting in just images, having around 40 slides of images and then set up a five minute timer and practiced what I was going to say and keeping it under five minutes for hours for around a week before we redid the presentation. When it came to presenting it I think I did a ton better, I haven't had my feedback yet but I stood up this time, looked at my audience and pointed at what I was talking about a lot of the time, knew exactly what I was saying, made my audience laugh a couple of times and pretty much was exactly five minutes. I truly hope I pass this time because I put a lot of practice into the redo! I also was told I talk about hot characters in games a lot. Heh.
So so far this term has been incredibly challenging, I really don't do much more than work, on my days off I normally get up and start working straight away and work into the late hours, it's rare for me to have a day where I'm not working for most of it, the only exceptions I can think of so far have been when I went back home for a weekend and took my sister to see Wreck it Ralph (a brilliant film by the way, go and watch it!) and the celebratory drinkup me and my friends had at the Speekeasy game bar in town after handing our Transit Vans in, other than that I more or less work solidly for most of the day, I'm looking forward to the end of this term and handing in all of the hard work I've done really, I truly hope the hours will pay off!
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