Working on my environment 2 (28/2/2013)

Going into college to crack on with some work I decided to tackle my environment again. 

First of all I focused on recolouring some of the buildings as looking back over them I felt that the ones closer to the foreground needed to be darker in order to show a better contrast when compared to the buildings in the background.
I also recognised that I couldn't tell what cultural style the back two buildings were meant to be, and on further inspection noticed that the other two were a mix of cultures as well. Therefore I decided that since the buildings are meant to be in a city full of contrasting cultures that I would use the colour scheme that would suit the scene and not necessarily the architectures' origin and design.

I then went on to removing the text on the screen and finding a picture of a mountain surface which I used as a means to create an effective looking backdrop. I was able to do this by tracing over the orignal picture before filling it in with that picture's original colour and then tweaking it where necessary (especially since the fill bucket ended up filling in previously blank areas by accident, thus I had to paint over those individually).
You can see the before and after below.

With the basic colours now complete, I decided to work on the light and shad of my environment. I added a glow to the windows and lights and made the alleys in between the buildings darker. I redid the Christmas lights again as I didn't make them glow nearly enough originally before adding a transparent black layer over the whole environment. With only the glows on top of this filter the enviroment appears lit up.
I even added smoke coming out of the chimney in order to give that building and the street more of a 'lived in' feel.

Overall I am really pleased with my work today as not only have I finished colouring in my piece, but I was also able to light it appropriately. This really shows when you look at the last two screenshots back to back as you could say that these are pictures taken in order to show the city during day and night.
I may go back to this again before the final deadline once I have had feedback from others.
Even though it now looks a lot darker than my usual preference for bright colours in my images, I feel that the colours I have used are still bright enough to keep my action/adventure game genre and atmosphere intact.  

Graphite and Ipad Drawings (26/2/2013)

Graphite Hand:

At the start of this session we all drew a box that we then shaded completely in Graphite Stick.

We then drew on transparent picture frames with one hand under the frame in order to trace that hand. We then put detail on the trace before using the picture frame as a reference to draw in the box. 

Once we had drawn our hands we added shading or rubbed out areas in order to show the contrast between light and dark and to make the drawing look three dimensional.

From doing the above I found out that I perhaps needed to draw more lightly as at the moment I draw very heavy/dark 'cartoon' lines which my lecturer did warn us about, as the task required different stick pressures. However, as cartoon and anime drawings are my style of art I struggled to break out of this habit and as a result most of my lines are darker than they should be. Therefore in the future I hope to break out of this habit in order to achieve more realistic drawings. 

I also recognise that I was unsure of what details to include in the picture or how to draw them. Therefore I feel that I rushed my piece at times and therefore hope to slow down in my next task.

Overall, I believe this task was not only to help us get better at drawing realistically, but also get us to use other methods in order to accomplish sketches and to encourage us to think about the finer details you can put into your work.

Ipad quick sketches:

Being reminded that we should also use other methods in order to create art I decided to use an Ipad in order to do some rough sketches. I had fun doing so, however I was only able to use one of the thicker pens and therefore this made it harder to draw accurate lines and fill small areas.

My first sketch was just a very quick and silly sketch of a Megaman type character. I could imagine seeing this hero in perhaps a children's book due the bright and explosive colours I used (which looking over it again reminds me of a 'Maisy the Mouse' book).  

I then went onto trying to draw the main hero from Persona 4 from memory (which turned out as well as you would expect) using layers and different coloured opacities in order to get the auras around the card and the character right. I used white lines in order to show the creases and layers of his jacket, but I don't think this is clear enough. He is also too cartoony and not nearly anime enough, I know, however trying to draw that style on an Ipad is very difficult and therefore I went with a more simplistic style.   

Lecturer's Painting: 

On a side note, the lecturer also showed us his painting of houses on a street. The colours he used helped to make the buildings look welcoming and the sky warm. Most importantly he was able to give it depth and make it look three dimensional. Therefore I went back to look over it again during my break and hope to be able to recreate such a atmosphere for my own current environment project.

Referencing: 

• Soejima, S (Unknown) Hero from Persona 4 [Online image]. Available at: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJK2Bz7GODFhKjo5-KiIb-Z5aCVFkv_VOJ90G-eXBdkEWy0cLn9Xa9H0Q6s_npEYAKXtI9s0cKwXgwjAQzbHGmLorUAieHQwjdfA-XxIu_tud1btep4ZG2qwqDG_CwijFpBppIIuH6TZgj/s640/p4a1.JPG (Accessed: 26/2/2013).

Freehand drawing (23/2/2013)

After working on some freehand drawing for my Theory session I decided to continue to do some more over the holiday. My second attempt as seen below underneath the orignal I feel didn't turn out as well sadly as I decided to use no reference images and even though I was keen to draw didn't know what to sketch. Therefore what I did do ended up being a mixed quality as even though my ideas were they perhaps my perspective and certain design choices weren't.

Working on my environment (19/2/2013)

Using the college computers during reading week I continued to work on my environment.
Throughout my work I also made sure to remove any lines from my original piece that I had either forgotten to remove or had drawn by mistake, thus making the final environment look cleaner and professional. 
You can see the process I got through during the day below.

I used gradients to make the Chinese Lanterns look as if they were glowing. Eventually I plan to add a soft glow around them to confirm they are lights as I did with the Christmas lights.
I then continued to colour in the rest of the floor level of my environment which included the road, pavement, welcome mat, trash can and all its mess.

I then started to choose a colour palette that would best suit an up close building and one meant to be of Chinese design. Therefore, having looked online for reference images I choose to use dark red for its walls and dark green for its roof.
I was able to paint the stain glass window using colours that had their opacity reduced to 50%.

I then experimented with whether to include a background in the scene yet or not, but after finding that it distracted me too much and covered areas I hadn't painted yet I decided to remove it for now.

Recognising that my Christmas lights had gone missing for some reason I made sure to go back to one of my previous back up saves and copy those lights into my scene.
I then decided to colour in the background building furthest away. By doing this I could then compare its light colour scheme to the dark colour scheme in order to come up with the right medium colours for the centre building.
I feel that by doing the above I was able to make the building furthest away look more 'face like' as the use of white and blue for the windows make for good eyes and the colours for the brick work are similar to skin tones.
I also decided to colour in the monster's shadow, slime, gnome, cactus plant, the valve on the roof vent, TV antenna and the top of the water tower during this phase.

Overall I feel that I have done a good day's work. However, I am not 100% sure on the colours I have used for my foreground building as it looks too similar to the closest background building. Even though I intended for the foreground building to be of Mexican design I realise that I may have used the wrong type of window as it looks more Chinese in design. Therefore I looked online to research what Mexican buildings did look like again and noticed that their colour schemes are usually lighter colours such as pink, blue, yellow and/or orange. Therefore I may come back another day and re-colour the foreground building in order for it to not look too much like the Chinese type building I painted already.
I also plan on looking at my background lines as since I reduced the contrast of them they seem quite hard to see. So, I will try and make them clearer for next time although I may not want this as it may once again ruin the perspective of the scene.

Further Art Presentations (11/2/2013)

At the start of this session we watched the remaining presentations of the group.

Afterwards I started to work on my final environment. You can see the process below.

Raising the contrast on the original image I was able to make the lines stand out more. I then started to separate each area of the fore ground building and paint it.
I decided to go with bright colours so as to show a contrast to the otherwise dark underground setting the city is in. Hopefully by including the sources of light later on I will be able to show this more clearly in my final piece.
This I decided to make a start on with the glow I gave the Christmas lights around the water tower.  

I almost forgot that I wanted to reduce the background's contrast in order to make the foreground stand out so I went back and did this before continuing.
Bonnie then advised me to make the front part of the background darker in colour to show the distance of the buildings further away. This is a good idea as the further away something is then the less detailed and colourful it appears. Therefore I made a mental note on this by including the words 'dark colours' and 'light colours' in the areas that would need them most.

Art Presentation (5/2/2013)

For this session I had to present a power point presentation based on the work that would go towards my final art project. Overall I feel that it went very well as not only did I feel confident while talking about it, but others also picked up on this.
After my presentation I was given the following comments and advice from both my peers and my lecturer.

• Really well presented and eye catching. Also liked how I annotated it clearly. 
• Great use of progress and effort I put into the final piece e.g. the stages I went through in order to figure out what the character would wear, outfit designs, faces and even how to drape the clothes correctly.  
• Gave good examples of techniques used e.g. lost and found line on the nose. 
• As I hoped, the character was well received and people recognised her as a calm, passive person especially, since I put her into a position one could compare with a praying mantis. They also felt that the eyes were good as they look directly at the audience and therefore this adds to both how relaxed she is and in some ways makes her mysterious. This is something new to me as when drawing her eyes I never thought about this. Therefore I am glad that people interpreted my work this way.   
• As I recognised before the presentation the feet could have been a lot bigger, although the lecturer said in my defence that smaller hands and feet could easily fit into the style of an action adventure genre as the style for such games includes disproportionate hands and feet.

BUT...

• Could have talked more about my environments in terms of their purpose in my imaginary game and why the player visits them.

Below is the assessment sheet that evaluated my presentation and my overall score of 66 which is fantastic considering I am at university level. My lecturer said that because it was a High 2.1 and close to getting a First that I should next time become more confident with my lines. Unsure of what this meant he explained that so far my drawing lines look a bit crooked and therefore need to be more rounded. Thus more confident.

The rest of the session was then spent watching the others presentations and reviewing their fantastic work. 

Genre Artwork 4 (29/1/2013)

Before I started to colour in my final character sketch our lecturer wanted to talk to us about grading for the module.

Grading works as following in Art: 

• Distinction (70-100).
• High Pass (60-69).
• Medium Pass (50-59).
• Low Pass (40-49).
• Fail (0-39).

In groups we analysed what we thought were the five key things we needed to present in our final work.
After doing so our lecturer then told us his five important things that you can see below.

1. Work.
2. Research. 
3. Analysis and Synthesis: Development. 
4. Presentation.    
5. Taught ideas and Skills.

The rest of the session was then spent coloring in my character as you can see below.

Wanting to add some shading and make her trousers look more camouflage like I went into college again on Thursday in order to produce the following.

Unhappy with this method in order to produce the pattern for her trousers I then used the advice from my friend Ryan which was to place a camouflage texture on one layer and then draw on an above layer above the camo's lines in order to get an effective pattern. You can see this process followed by the final image below.

Overall I am really pleased with my final piece as although the hands and feet are not 100% in proportion I feel that the colours used are the right balance of light and dark and that making her t-shirt any other colour would distract from the rest of her design. I am also glad that I didn't put any symbols on her t-shirt as that would also have been distracting.