W31 “You are the sunflower of my eyeball”

Leonie’s small blog island says hullooo! (:
I hope your Friday has been/is going well. Some things happened here, I think.
Eyeballs and portraits this week and more figure drawing as usual!

Let’s go! Journal Time!

14th Wed

Figure drawing adventuuures: I am not making captions for my figure drawings anymore and instead will make general comments like this instead. Ran out of new & silly things to say.

Self portrait for the day: blurpy deformed looking self

PV progress as team leader: there’s only less than 6 weeks remaining and everyone is feeling the crunch due to how things are falling too far behind schedule. We’ve all agreed to cut out the pot plant tentacle character completely and Tonko has put forward milestones to be reached by this week to get this project going. Since I have finished my paintings today, I will be helping him with 3D scene set up tomorrow to ease the load. The sound package is to be sent tomorrow instead, once we’ve got some renders made. I don’t feel sad about cutting the pot plant character as essentially the Secretary, The Creature and The Interviewee were the only characters in my original story pitch.
PV Textures for the Paintings and Employee Portraits. Aside from the Secretary, all the other characters were simply created based on the previous update’s thumbnails. I might plan to incorporate these “unnecessary to the plot” characters for something. I’ve also done something relevant to this series but I’m not showing it for the sake of spoilers (arguably you are spoiled heaps already!) The following portraits I will probably keep working on.

15th Thurs

Train drawing adventuuures: there was a very cold and shivering lady and a tall gentleman with very long legs not feeling the cold.

Figure drawing adventuuures: on shiny paper!

Self portrait for the day
PV progress as team leader: I started doing textures for the paint tubes but I may have to redo them again because of reasons outside my control. Everyone was pretty busy with their respective roles and I worked with Tonko on referencing and positioning all the 3D assets from shots 3B to shot 20 today. Got 10 more shots to go tomorrow! I wasn’t fast in using Maya as it has been a long while since I used it but I eventually got back into gear. I was so fast thanks to Victor‘s file organisation system and referencing as well as the efficient modeling of Tonko. (:
Research Project: I started an outline plan of the whole project and focused on putting the scope into writing…but it’s far from done.

16th Fri

PV progress as team leader: well it seems like I’m going to be “leader” for 3 weeks running as everyone’s incredibly too busy to take the baton during crunch time. This is because I was incredibly busy doing pre-production during the early stages of the project while now we’re late into production stage and pre-production was finally finished when I chose the colours. I am now the team member that helps out with the odd jobs!

To ease the load I continued to help out Tonko (as his area is lighting, rendering and setting up the 3D scenes). I finished off referencing assets from 21 to 30, painted basic textures for the ceiling and paint tubes, went through all the assets that still needed colour, materials as well gamma correction applied, then split elements into render layers from shot 1 to 25 (sans 3 shots). Apparently I worked like “a machine” according to Tonko but he gave me the easy but time consuming tasks while he problem solved the lighting and rendering.

Self portrait for the day: I look worse by the day.

17th Sat

Self portrait for the day: Decided to draw from a different angle.

Figure drawing adventuuures: a few male and the rest female. And did another self doodle.

Research Project: Finally decided on a concrete direction for assessment purposes and another for personal purposes. Found myself immersed into finding names of more and more countless concept artists, illustrators and visual development artists out there and the limitless amounts of people striving to get there as well. I didn’t want to spend too long appreciating amazing art however!

I know this industry is incredibly competitive with increasing amounts of highly skilled people vying for the same jobs, the experienced and brilliant artists are also in the mix; it is incredibly daunting but I’m just going to keep doing my best and see where it takes me as worrying about the “competition” doesn’t get you anywhere. Still, I can’t help but stop in my tracks a bit and wonder if I’ll ever get anywhere near the level of the artists I’ve discovered today. Decided to not incorporate the artists I’ve found into the project as I do not have the time to do it well.

For this research project, I’m planning to post my ongoing trials and findings on a Tuesday once a month in the distant future. For now, I am going to sort out and prepare for the assessment version with a much realistic and smaller scope.

18th Sun

Figure drawing adventuuures

Self portrait for the day: remainder of the figure drawing exercise and my silly face

Research Project: starting to write out my draft based on my research. There wasn’t much concrete “peer reviewed publications” on the subject but I’m going to make the most of with what I could find.
Blog jump breaks: decided to add these because my blog posts are becoming incredibly long that one post actually fills up the whole home page! Originally I didn’t want visitors clicking on anything further once they got to the home page but this is getting ridiculous. Now the home page finally shows more than one post but all the images you can see is the header image for the journal entries. I need to make a better one some time.

Went through 154 blog posts to apply the jump breaks where needed, deleted 30 out of 154 blog posts (now 124 remain) where the images were no longer valid, jump breaked a lot of the embarrassing posts but kept the post there to add on top of my pit of shame. From all this, I realised I need to write somewhat proper introductions from now on and how silly I was in my posts even two years ago. Let’s just say most things in the past are my dark ages and we’ll move on from it, shall we?

19th Mon

Self Portrait for the Day & Figure drawing adventuuures

Research Project: draft becoming a finished version. Started exploring what I could do for the tutorial section.

20th Tues

Self Portrait for the Day

Figure drawing adventuuures: silly doodles and wonky legs at the end.

Research Project: preparing for the tutorial section a bit but didn’t get far
Blog Header Revamp: Since I’ve mandated jump breaks, I had to make it so that the headers of each blog had some sort of preview in them (see this post’s header). Added glasses to myself and rearranged how I’m doing the labeling. I hope things look more nicer.

Reflection for the Week

I think I’m glad I don’t care about how horrible I draw myself now? Hooray? I’m getting a bit sniffy again but not as bad as the cold I had previously. I do keep poking fun of my own face during the portraits because it’s my face and I’m not really getting the likeness, I’m not afraid to admit. Will need to keep going at it.

Also! As I don’t even have an ipad or the SurfacePro, the newly announced Wacom Companion Hybrid Pro is looking wonderfully good; not something I can afford but someday I hope to own one. Curious about the reviews though because there’s Hybrid, and the non-Hybrid one. A Cintiq 13HD or a bigger Cintiq for the desktop would be great instead too. Though I do need to upgrade my laptop to something that can do more higher performance things as well. Perhaps in the distant future, when I can afford to. (:

As I look back at my own work, it dawned on me that over these two years I’ve finally started to let go of what I felt like I “should” be drawing, namely hyper/photo-realistic, sci-fi, fantasy, “cool” and highly detailed designs and just go ahead with what I enjoy drawing; stylised, colourful and cartoony designs. I’m not saying I won’t try other things and completely pigeon hole myself because both design approaches can include powerful visual storytelling but I don’t want to draw something for the wrong reasons. I will strive to try different styles however as that’s how you learn new things!
As I think about it, it feels a bit liberating to simply allow myself to figure out what, when and how I’m going to learn what I enjoy. And I’ve got my whole lifetime to do it (with you enjoying your own life alongside I would hope!)

Takeaway for the week: Make time to do what you enjoy. Ignore what you think is expected of you; do something that you believe in for yourself without a doubt.

Thanks for looking, especially those who have been reading! (:
Until next time, Leonie
(UUUinfinity/TripleUinfinity)