Does the work ever end?!

At NUCA, I have to do a critical studies course alongside my Games Art and Design. This is specific to digital games in popular culture and we cover a wide variety of topics from interactivity to semiotics, from representation to gender. My current assignment was to pick a topic and research and investigate it. The method of delivery I chose was an essay, and my subject topic was about Gender in Digital games. I am creating a kind of side line blog (see my links) to collate my research and perhaps summarize my thoughts. I also have to do a small non-assessed presentation on my topic, but I do have some time to prepare all this.

Creature!

Here is an initial concept for a marine creature. I spent quite along time in Photoshop doing this, but it turned out rather well! The tentacles stun any little fish that try to pass through them, then the marine creature would just swim round and eat them.

Busy Busy week!

This week I have been given not one but two briefs! I also have a personal brief to complete, and an Easter holiday to attempt to fit in somewhere! 

The first brief is a Live brief, from a company called PocketPlaces, they can be found on www.pocketplaces.co.uk from your web browser or www.m.pocketplaces.co.uk from any mobile phone. Basically they are a travel guide company for your mobile phone, but they are updating the feel of this basic form, and came to my Uni to add some interactivity to their site. They have asked me and my fellow students to design an interactive game to have on their site, then they will pick the best one or two ideas, take them away, develop them and then code and launch the game. 

The second brief is for my course, and this is basically to create a Marine creature character, with full design sheets etc. Also we will be modeling and animating this in 3D, so we need orthographic drawings and silhouettes and basically a lot of work!

My personal brief is to start making a small and simple game in Flash, something that I can do some animation in, some coding and that I can start collating my skills and work towards actually producing some small games.

And lastly, it's Easter! So I have 3 weeks to try and fit in as much of this work as I can, and I'm hoping for some time to relax too.

Photomanipulation :S

This is my first attempt at Photomanipulation. The stock photo is from Dagwanoenyent-stock(DeviantART). It's very rough, but I liked the look :) I think I will go back an do some refinements at some point.

Cloth.

I had a few minutes spare, and I was looking at my curtains... I am designing a character which has ALOT of cloth effects and folds etc... so..curtains. And yes I thought it would be a good idea to practice some cloth. Here is my first attempt. I'm working on proportions and lighting more in my next drawings, but this is my first! :)

Life drawing continued...

Here are some drawings I made using this amazing site called www.posemaniacs.com and these are all 30 second poses. Basically on this site there are several drawing resources, and I particularly like the timed models who change pose every 'so-many' seconds depending on what you set it as. Also they are just computer representations of humans, so they have their muscle structures showing, which is very helpful for shapes. It really helps to improve your hand-eye drawing, also helps you to pick out the main structures of the body faster. I didn't study art at school, so this has helped my anatomical knowledge immensely aswell as just my base drawing skill!

Life Drawing

No one can emphasize how important some good old fashioned life drawing is, even for a digital artist. So basically this post is just a small amount of my life drawing from this term.

Firstly here is some with live models from my actual lifedrawing class at Uni.

(Apologies for the shadows in the photos!)

First photoshop session ...

When I started my uni course, in the very first Photoshop session we had I started this image. And to be honest I had never even opened Photoshop before! So I was rather pleased with this as my first painting. Although it's abit rough and still unfinished I thought it would be nice to show my origins, plus I just found the .jpg!

Also I have created a deviantART account, my name is PurpleFeltTip and I will be posting all my work on there to.

Animation Project!

Basically for Uni I was set a brief to study people's walk-cycles and then to animate one! It only needed to be about 10 seconds of walking but it's surprising how many drawings that means! Also we weren't allowed to loop any of the footage, so each frame was different from any other. First of all I did the traditional 2D animation, with my trusty new light-box and pencils, layout paper and ALOT of patience! I did several line tests early on to check how fluid my movements were, and to my delight I only needed to 'fiddle' with the FPS a little to have a nice smooth animation. After telling myself to stop being such a perfectionist and redrawing each frame again and again for little difference, I finally was happy with my Final Line Test. Here take a look.

After this I imported it into Flash, and basically re-drew everything again! Also I could change the timings, add titles, colours and backgrounds. So I did some rough design work on how I wanted it to look, and I decided to make it bright, vibrant and in that stylised Flash animation look that I really like. And after MANY hours of tampering and choping and changing, I am finally happy to present my Final finished Flash animation! 

This is going to be submitted at the end of the week along with all my research and development work. I have really enjoyed using Flash this time around and I will definitely be making an effort to use it again! I have also been learning some coding so I can make interactive sequences.