Course reflections & major assignments!

Work flow

While working on the major assignments I decided to start with the lighting of the background. I made this decision as I figured that would be the assignment which would be the most time consuming of the two.
I started out with the horizon, light source and making the entire picture darker as a whole and proceeded to start darkening each individual surface. While working on the background I ended up re-lighting each building several times around, making it darker/lighter to make it look just the way I wanted. After that I finished off with some details and light shimmer on the light-exposed edges.
While working on the rough I hit several snags in the form of hands, boots and face. Eventually I managed to make the boots and hands look the way I wanted. Working on the face was the most difficult thing about the assignment and I ended up remaking the face several times around. Eventually I managed to make the face look pretty much like how I wanted it to, I wanted him to look somewhat tired and sad. In the end I would have wanted to make time for making the clothes look more alive, but the aforementioned issues I had ended up too time consuming for me.
In the end I am happy with what I managed to come up with, and feel proud with a lot of specific details in both of the assignments.

Reflections and my development

All in all, this course has been a bit of a struggle uphill for me as I was very inexperienced and I’ve had some problems with specific parts of the course. However, I have tried really hard to work my way around these problems and I have seen large improvements in my own work weekly. I have been proud of the work I have done one week only to look back the next week and feel like I’m a different person from the one who drew it. It has been a good experience and the feeling of seeing my own improvements has been incredible! I know that I still have a lot of training left to do, but I can still say that I feel good about the way this course has improved me!

Lighting of Character

This week we have worked on lighting of our character as well as a simpler environment. This assignment was, while difficult, a lot of fun. In my opinion it instantly made the ”character build” drawing look better. Hopefully the picture looks as good to others as it did to me!
Still had some issues with getting together a collection of the artwork I’ve made so far, but as soon as I have it all in one place I will put it up here to be able to compare the pictures to show the progress I’ve made so far!

Last weeks assignment

Last week we worked on building up our characters by taking one of our thumbnails, adjusting its pose and finally filling in details. The biggest problem I had with this assignment was making the head (both helmet and face) look right. After having made a number of versions of the helm I realized that the problem probably lay in the design of the helmet. Eventually I managed to create one that I was somewhat satisfied with. This week however while doing the turnarounds of our characters I decided to fix the helm up properly and got some help with how to draw faces. From time to time it feels like I’m about to miss the deadline, but so far I haven’t missed one yet. Going to start uploading some pictures from the start of the course up until now, but at the moment I don’t have all the pictures I want to include in digital form.

Perspectives & workshop

While working with the assignment to draw a car and an airplane, what I found to be most difficult was to figure out what to make of it. What kind of airplane, what kind of car etc. At one point during my drawing of the airplane, I was trying to pinpoint the middle of the airplane “cylinder” but couldn’t remember how to do it, eventually I solved the problem though. 

It feels like the perspective lectures came right on time since we had the workshop Thursday-Friday and while working with it we started creating our own sprites. At one point I was trying to make a coin, that would be turning around in the game and to make this look good I had to create 5 sides to the coin: Front, slightly turned, side, slightly turned towards the back and a backside, and when doing this it felt like I had good use of what we had done during the lectures.

2D-graphics

This week we have started our course in 2D-graphics. We have started drawing with the help of models. I have been worried about starting with this as I have no previous experience with it, but after two days of doing it, im starting to feel less concerned. For now I’m going to practice and await the first assignments!

Working on the menu interface

Right, so the project we are working on right now has kicked off and we have assigned different tasks to our group members.
My task was to work on the ”menu” of the game and to draw up sketches of how said menu would look.
After that I’ve been left with three possible choices, since it’s sort of a ”Fantasy/sci-fi” type of setting.
My choices are now down to:

*Sci-fi menu with stars etc.
*Fantasy menu with a different type of writing and background
*Or try and make a mashup between the two.
The last one is so far only something I’ve thought about, but so far I haven’t figured out how to make that look good.

Going to present the sketches I’ve made so far to the group this tuesday to see what they have to say about the options!