Critical Evaluation: End of the Road

Critical Evaluation: The Last Project

The time has come to end the project that is BA8: Final Project 2. Having worked on this particular project since late 2010, I’ve become literally attached to my creation and immersed in the world of my game concept. Working long hours day and night on various ideas through sketchbook work, notes and reflective journal posting, I’ve managed to create the most appealing artwork I have done since my time at university.

It all began with an idea to create a sci-fi/fantasy based conceptual idea revolving around abandoned dolls & child labour, which swiftly evolved into a game concept based around witchcraft, the Victorian Era and two characters with a strong relationship. Usually my character creations don’t leave an imprint in my mind, as they have remained weak and easily forgettable. For once I focused only on a pair of characters, not several or a group, only a pair. This pair I soon became attached with and my skills in character design & concept art took off to a whole new level. The theme of witchcraft came to mind during Halloween of last year believe it or not, after I realised that witches themselves make decent characters within any form of media and for years have sparked a great interest in me, thus the beginning of pre-production document BA7 “Arsulla” was born. Strangely enough I did become rather obsessed with witchcraft over the months, dwelling deeper and deeper into the subject, even as far as studying how witch characters behaved in television such as in the show “Charmed” or in video games such as “Bayonetta” to documentaries about the Salem Witch Trials, which provided inspiration behind my game concept characters.

After researching massively into how witches are portrayed in folklore and popular culture within my pre-production document and research report, my character designs had a solid foundation to be built upon in order for them to become noticeable figures with their own distinctive features & personalities as witches in BA8. As I spent months developing my characters before finalising their form, I spent hours every day or so building up my digital art skills such as painting skin tones, facial features and texture. Many trial images I painted ended up never being used in my final project due to my impatience with perfecting my drawings. Colouring has never been my strongest skill and with great determination, I focused hard on changing the way I work within my concept art. Various tutorials, life drawing and studying the work created by artists I admire strengthened my determination to improve. Originally I had in mind to create concept art on many characters, including possible villains, non-playable characters etc, but in the end I chose to only focus on my main characters as it would require less work and I could achieve creating better artwork through limiting myself, keeping in the back of my mind that “less is more”. A major weakness of mine is time management, in which I end up working on more than I can handle or become fixated on detail within my artwork, limiting the time I have left to make it look decent.

While focusing on only the portrayal of the two characters, I decided the most effective way to describe my game concept in the most simplified yet artistic form was to create a short illustrated storyboard featuring how the characters would act cooperatively in battle against their enemies and various conceptual pieces featuring them working as a team or standing on their own to give a sense that they are also strong individuals. Overall I think I have done a good job on portraying my game concept purely just through character concept art in a finalised show reel. I’ve worked to the best of my ability and it’s surreal to think this is my last ever university project.

Taking control of my weaknesses was tough yet achievable towards the end outcome. Throughout these three years of studying Games Art & Design, my final year has been the most challenging and required much determination. I know in the long run this will pay off and hopefully one day, something achievable will become of this game concept and my overall talent. With the amount of skills & techniques I have learned, I hope to improve continuously in the near future, all it will take is a good dose of confidence and motivation to become a better artist.

Into the sunset...work in progress.

It looks rather funny due to the characters have no facial features just yet, so they remain without noses. On the positive side, clouds are lovely to draw in Photoshop when using a low opacity/flow normal brush, the effect created by the brush gives a rather "fluffy" texture.

My Website Front Page Image

It didn't take no more than 10 minutes to make. Here is the image for my website's homepage. Later on I will produce something more nicer, but for now this will do and it fits my website well. I'm very proud of my progress so far and having my own website with a personalised domain, it's something entirely new to me.

Work In Progress: Getting Close...

These images are taking a while due to how large of a scale I've drawn them in and not to mention these are my favourite pieces so far. Plan to play around with textures and paint some rain effects on the right hand image.

Helen McCarthy: A Brief History on Manga& Anime

So today I attended a lecture on a brief history of manga & anime. It was highly interesting learning everything about the art that is manga and discovering some unknown facts about the industry. Helen McCarthy was a wonderful lecturer, she was very kind and had a cracking sense of humour. She gave me advice on getting into the manga & anime industry (if I was ever to do so) and she said the key to being successful is to have a brilliant show reel AND portfolio. With those two you can't go wrong according to her words. She even advised I one day visit Japan to become more involved in the country's culture.

It's worth thinking about...if I had the money to travel there!

Work In Progress: Costumes

Playing around with alternative costume designs. Unfortunately these won't go into my show reel as I feel it would ruin the quality of my work, so I'll show them here and maybe on my website.

A little programme called Alchemy...

I just realised I have very rough sketches drawn in the software Alchemy. The results are quite amazing, I never knew such a programme existed. It was incredibly helpful with clothing design for my characters in terms of drawing everything equally without one side being less even than the other.

Threadless T-Shirt Design

Over at Threadless.com I have designed a cute little character named "Little Soapy Fro" for one of the many challenges hosted by the website. By submitting my design I'm promoting my work thus gaining it a bit more publicity. Here is the shirt design below:

Here is the original artwork for it, since then has been slightly changed:

The contest remains in voting stage as of now and will take a while until I hear the results. The prizes include:

• $2,000 donated to the school of your or your kid collaborator's choice!
• $500 Threadless Gift Certificate (can be redeemed for $200 cash)
• $2,000 in cash from Threadless! 

Very impressive I must say.

Work in progress once again...

More Work In Progress...

Work in progress of the younger protagonist of my game concept. I've figured out a new painting style to give my characters more personality. Plus I've been aiming to perfect backgrounds so they aren't so dull. I plan to paint each background of my character portraits like this. A certain colour defines their theme as an individual, for example this one's theme is lilac/purple and makes her recognizable from the main protagonist.

Work In Progress: Simply Magical

Featuring a close up on the younger protagonist's hand casting a spell and her performing a summoning trick.

Example of concept art + painting style...

Here is an example of one of the concept art pieces I have worked on. I've experimented around with texture and overlaying textures to give the picture an overall dark/grunge feel. From looking at it several times I've achieved it, though I need to practice more with lighting, especially from the glowing magic circle above my character's head. Still more painting to go, though I'm getting there!

A busy Easter break!

So for my final portfolio I have decided on a theme of images to stick to that will be included in my showreel. This will include:

• 1 storyboard with 5 panels showing an example of gameplay in a visual story form.
• 2 action portraits showing how the main characters work as a team.
• 1 of these portraits mentioned above will show the villains of my game concept.
• 2 portraits of the characters as their past selves and one of a minor character.
• 2 basic character sheets, front, back and half side view.
• Several "parody" images of the characters in different costumes.

In the past few weeks I've spent time colouring and sketching back and forth, so I've been quite productive. As long as I get all artwork completed by at least the end of the first week of May I am sorted. My website is also coming along okay. I will post a link to it shortly once it's edited to my liking.

What a beautiful necklace...I

I quickly took a snapshot of two beautiful rose necklaces laying in a shop window, one with several rose pendants around the collar, the other only has one. They reminded me of the rose brooches on my main protagonist's costume design, so kept this picture for future reference.

Life Drawing Samples #2

Work In Progress

The above image was painted in Photoshop CS2. I was experimenting with blending of skin tones, highlights and realism. Unfortunately I disliked this image halfway through my project and ended working on it by moving on to getting more easier sketches done.

This image was drawn in the studio a week or so ago. I challenged myself to speed paint a possible villain character for my game concept in under an hour. I managed to paint this within 30 minutes, using grey and black tones and using white to highlight the skin and eyes. It was very fun to do.

A large scale image of my main protagonist summoning or casting some form of spell. This is a difficult piece so far considering I need to think of my light source for the magical aura that will smother her hands later on. 

And it's amusing to notice my characters have such big thick hair. The more hair the better!

Dreamscape Contest 2011: CgSociety

Here is my entry for the Dreamscape Contest over at CGSociety. Usually I don't work with environments in my artwork or even go near them, but this was a challenge.It's a sunset paradise world filled with fluffy clouds, peach coloured rocky mountains and pearly pink & warm yellow bubbles, with a magical waterfall included and a sky of glowing stars. No winners have been announced since I submitted this a month ago. I'll remain patient though...

Life Drawing Samples #1

Colouring Tutorials + Art Styles

Throughout my work I've been pondering on what possible colouring style I would like to achieve within my work that reflects on what skills I'm building up at the moment, including skin colour theory & improvement on anatomy. I've found the following tutorials to be helpful in my "work in practice progress" or at least worth a look into further once I complete all my sketch work for this project before coluring takes place:

"Loish Portrait Tutorial: ImagineFX Issue #65"

"Charlie Bowater: Drawing/Colouring Video Tutorial"


Video Tutorial from charlie bowater on Vimeo.

"Arnold Tsang: Whistler Step by Step Colouring Tutorial"

"Vinegar: Bite Me Drawing Tutorial"

My drawing style is more sketchy and messy rather then neat on most occasions so I feel these tutorials suited my work best. I will continue to practice using a variety of techniques from each, as well as from various other guides and my own knowlege.

Great Article on Character Development

"Figures: They Speak for Themselves"

http://dresdencodak.tumblr.com/post/3583964949/figures-they-speak-for-themselves-mildly-nsfw


Here in this article written by artist Aaron Diaz are the important key elements on creating a good character, including sense of style, which role the character plays, how to reveal it's personality through expression, clothing & unique features and body language. It got me thinking on how I would like to finalise my characters and what could differ them from one another and on possibly future improvement in other characters I may work on in the future. This is incredibly helpful and the good news is there's a previous link to another character development article. Worth a read if you're a character design artist.

Update on the Daily Sketching...

So for the past few weeks I have been sketching ideas for my character designs & illustrations as well as and a basic outline on the following key notes:

• Costume design + overall portrayal of characters as themselves.
• Possible alternate costumes, weapons, what are their personalities.
• Composition of final illustrations + variety of themed sketches.
• How I could express the narrative of my game concept through the artwork.
• Possible styles of colouring eg. skintone, shadow, lighting etc. 
• Overall drawings will be semi realistic.

I'll post several sketches here of what I've been working on.

The Stan Lee Foundation: Superhero Contest

A message was brought up through email from my tutor about a competition that revolved around creating a original, creative and inspiring new superhero character for the Stan Lee Foundation over at TalentHouse, a website full of great contests for artists worldwide to participate in.

As creating a character would go towards my character development skills for brief BA8, I created a superheroine named "Jelluah" here:

The story behind Jelluah:

Tallulah Gale aka "Jellulah" is budding freelance underwater photographer who lost part of her soul to the heart of the ocean after a viscious attack by magical jellyfish, which left her unable to continue living a normal everyday life. As night falls her body morphs into that of half a jellyfish and she must keep hydrated by drinking only sea water. With her new form, Tallulah has the ability ease through spaces such as cracks and underneath doors as a clear slime, making her practically invisible to the human eye. With criminals constantly lurking around at night, Talluah uses her basic fighting skills and a powerful ability to sting using her hands which causes severe pain to them. Once her victim has been attacked they slowly become paralyzed, leaving them to never to harm the innocent or bring evil to the world again.

I find jellyfish fanscinating so creating a character based on them was very fun in the end. Now I can only hope she will at least get viewed and complimented on in terms of her design. I'd appreciate any comment I get.

Contest entry is here: http://www.talenthouse.com/creativeinvites/preview/a4da852f3a6a79c0b4951b9941b0ee77/154

Character Sheet 001

Here's some quick and random character portraits I did today in Photoshop, I'm rather pleased with them. This is part of my Drawing-A-Day plan. :)

Presentation Blues

I think I did fairly okay in my presentation I had yesterday, though I felt I didn't explain my game concept idea or my plans for the BA brief enough for everyone to understand. I had over 20 slides worth of information that felt like I only explained half of it in 5 minutes so lets not hope this is the case.

I am indeed happy with the predictive grade I got for BA7 (69% is great!). I aim to at least graduate with a 2:1 or a 1st if I'm lucky enough. Already I am thinking of ideas to create brilliant work for BA8, such as sketching in Photoshop/Corel Painter everyday or so to build up my drawing skills that could possibly be good enough for the industry in the end.

Working On Presentation: Part 1

So my presentation on my research for my studio work in BA7 and aspects of my research report is to be done this Friday arriving. As of now I have the layout of each of the slides in Microsoft Powerpoint and rough notes on what I would like each slide to contain and how long they should roughly be as I tend to talk rather fast during presentations due to nerves. I shall be fine though! I'm going work on several rough concept pieces for the presentation that are newer and better than those shown in my research document for BA7.