blogger? more like frogger

This was my upside down drawing. It was pretty accurate really. Nothing looks too out of place except for maybe the hair and some lopsided ears. This was my right side up drawing. This is more accurate especially in the subtleties of his expression. The hair has much more satisfying swoops as well. Some hands. I already tend to go with a mitten-first approach when drawing hands. I'll usually go in with more details after but, like Hilary said, sometimes you just need the general idea of a hand there. Some hair. I didn't mean to make the first sketch kinda look towards the second one but it kinda is, huh? Hair is definitely an area that I'd like to improve on in my drawing 🫡.

 Final week!      I spent the first few days finishing the car turnaround sheet which I'm happy with. I think it's quite clear, although it's still a little confusing and complicated by nature of the design. Clearer 3D drawings and diagrams would help but I didn't implement these in the interest of time. I also added a fully rendered drawing on the top right corner to more clearly show the materials and the car's form. Sam worked on the character turnaround at the same time.     We added an extra page of notes for the 3D modellers. Many of these are on the turnaround sheets as well but we figured it would be helpful to have all the notes together on one page as well.      I am really happy with how the final character and vehicle designs look together. Sam did the majority of the hero image work - I only helped with decision making and the sketch. I think it looks very cool and dynamic and has a classic arcade game kind of look.   ...

We have a final character and vehicle design! Yay!! Colours      Sam and I (more so Sam) spent most of the first half of the week figuring out our character's colour palette. We ended up spending far too much time on it. We started with just 10 colour variations and found that most people liked the one with the dark green jacket. We didn't really like the green but discovered that its appeal was more about the contrast in colour and values, as our other palettes were quite muted and light. This was quite helpful to know, but clearly we went a little overboard with further variations.       I like the palette we ended up choosing. Its high saturation lends well to the tech-y y2k aesthetic we've ended up leaning towards. For the vehicle colours, we went with a few monochromatic options, both our of fear of over-complicating it again, and also because the character has quite a hectic colour palette already. While refining the vehicle design and referring ...

I haven't really learnt anything new this week, but I have been made aware of the convenience of tool shortcuts, and found a new appreciation for the "Continuous" toggle on the Magic Wand and Fill tools. I don't tend to use tool shortcuts because I have a screen tablet at home that I use for digital art, and so pressing on tool icons with my tablet pen is quick enough. Additionally, I have my tablet pen buttons set to the "Grab Canvas" and "Eyedropper" tools. Also, I can also never track which "pen", "pencil", or "brush" I'm on in CSP so I found those shortcuts annoying to learn. There's also this whole thing with drawing left-handed but using the computer mouse right-handed, where I'm used to using keyboard shortcuts with my left hand and not my right - it took an unusually long time for my right hand to get used to ctrl z. However, this week, I did some work on Photoshop on a UC computer, and some work on...

Some facial expressions. I'm actually quite happy with these! I don't draw interesting expressions very often and I have a bit of trouble simplifying when drawing from reference but I did a pretty good job here :). The third one looks like the roblox smirk. The quick pose we drew in class and the pose I drew for funsies during class. This is my hand.

My sketch of the back of a head.        After this sketch we were encouraged to observe how we used lines to convey form and shadow. I didn't really do any shading and I guess I don't tend to when doing quicker sketches. I think this is nice for just focusing on shape and form, but a light and shadow focused sketching technique could be fun and might vary my process a bit. I might try this with charcoal, or a wide brush digitally. Line of action, torso line, and center of gravity.     Yeah, me too, buddy.      With this pose, the goal was to express the pose and its feeling in as little detail as possible. I don't think I'm very good at that as I'm very used to drawing what I see, which makes me a little resistant to exaggerating poses.   

Further Vehicle Variation  A very far back leaning motorbike, using one of Sam's vehicle thumbnails. It took a bit of finagling to figure out where someone could sit on top of this vehicle silhouette, and I ended up with something viable(?) but goofy-looking. It's kinda fun and funny, but probably a little too goofy.        I tried instead to place the driver inside by filling it out, which unfortunately does remove the cool center circle.    Left: original thumbnail, filled out, then turned into a car. Right: similar car design with the top taken off and replaced with just a (precarious) windshield.         I think an open top car suits our character best as it reflects quite a few of the common racing vehicles, as well as convertible cars which have a 2000s preppy kind of association (see: Mean Girls, "Get in loser, we're going shopping.")        I also cleaned up this car design as people quite liked it, ...

Illustrator Pen tool = p Anchor point tool = shift + c   The last time I used a pen tool and vectors was maybe a full decade ago, and my curved line making process somehow felt smoother back then, but I can't really remember what I did or what program I was using.  This time I stuck with the pen tool, blocking out the main shapes, then used the anchor point tool to create curves in my lines.  I played around a bit with the gradient tool which was fairly intuitive.     <-- this reverses the gradient.   I tried using some halftones but they didn't look very good. Halftones are under: Effect > Pixelate > Color Halftone... Selecting layers was a little finicky. In the Layers window, clicking the circle "targets" the layer. AFAIK just selecting the layer(s) is for re-ordering them. You want to "target" a layer when changing it's properties or editing it in any way. Directly clicking on an object targets the top "group".   Maya Fil...

I spent the first half or so of this week refining our moodboard:  - adding annotations (explaining why an image interests us)  - removing repetition   - finding image sources/replacing images with ones that I could reference  - ... thinking about adding colour palettes    I go into a long ramble about finding original image sources here:        Finding the original image sources, while ethically necessary, was a bit tedious especially because we originally found all our images on Pinterest. Through my source hunting, I did end up finding some cool stuff: amazing fashion shows from Aniye Records, fantastical but possibly sus underwater girl photography by Manabu Koga, and the neo-y2k graphic design work of Giacomo Sforza. It's given me and Sam some motivation to discover and keep a track of interesting designers and artists we come across for future inspiration.       I've also discovered that some kinds of image...