Thursday 21 November 2013

Recap: From Rainstorms And Other Obstacles

Time to catch up!


Time management is not always easy; And neither is writing this blog regularly. So besides having to work on my personal skill development I will also need to focus and come up with a schedule for myself to better balance my busy life. In the future I will try to aim to write these posts more regular, but for now I will continue with my recap-series to bring this blog up to date with my experiences at uni so far.



Drawing in the Rain.


So here we are, once again; Living in the United Kingdom does have its benefits at times but it also comes with one major problem for an artist: Rain.

While we are expected to do all our drawings from life, I do not have a problem with that at all, until the weather decides to put up a massive obstacle. Rain does not only make it a lot more uncomfortable to draw, it also likes to soak your sketchbook, ultimately ruining all of your work.

So what to do in hard times like these? Well first of all it's all about being flexible. Sure, it does rain quite often during this time of the year, however there will always be periods of dryness in-between the showers. This is the time that artists like myself should go out and draw! As weather predictions are not always 100% accurate, this means that you sometimes spontaneously need to go outside. This is not something a person can plan.

Another quite important part is equipment. I have invested in a camping chair which makes it a lot more comfortable to draw on the site. I also decided to get myself an umbrella for those rainy days. Now just to solve the problem of holding an umbrella while drawing with the other hand.



Work Progress.


But enough of me ranting about all the stuff that's making this course harder than it already is. Here is some of my progress that I have made over the past few weeks:

Life Drawing

While life drawing seems to be my weakest subject I do have to say that I kinda enjoy getting to use a variety of different mediums. I particularly like using charcoal, even though it seems to be a bit of a hassle and quite messy.

I can see slight improvement in my work, but it will still take quite a while for me to get proportion good enough to be even slightly happy with my drawings. Until then I must increase my practice. I ordered a mannequin to get the hang of drawing proportion from life, but I guess I will ultimately go and get some people that I can draw; even if it means I end up having to draw myself.

Week 2

Week 3

Week 5

Visual Design

On the other hand, the rest of my visual design stuff seems to be going great. I can see improvement simply by looking through the pages and I really enjoy getting out to draw different things (as long as it's not raining of course..)

Week 2

Week 3

Week 3

Week 4

Game Production

Probably the easiest part for me. Since I came to this course with 2 years of experience in using 3DS Max, I do not particularly find it difficult fulfilling the set tasks, however it seems like I have recently not been putting in enough time into my models and I found myself rushing through them way too fast and not putting in the effort that I could put in.

Nonetheless I do still think that they are not too bad, just not good enough for what I could make out of them. In the future I will try and spend more time on creating my models and especially my textures, which I seem to have most troubles with.

Phonebox Project

Architecture Project