To Senior Year

Sometimes I remember I have a blog and I tell myself, "oh, I should really delete that someday soon, I don't remember what's on it, but I probably don't want that out there".

I'm a senior now. I just finished my second to last semester a few days ago, and I graduate in only a few more months. My life right now consists of: How am I going to get a job? How am I going to pay off my loans? How am I going to polish my portfolio? Where am I going to print my business cards? Is this tweet okay to put on my twitter? Should I friend this professor on facebook? What should I say when I meet someone in the industry? What am I going to do about my apartment? Am I going to stay in Seattle or am I going to move? What if I have to move back home?? etc etc

So I came onto my blog expecting to delete it in an attempt to clean up my social media presence, but I'm glad I updated so regularly in my underclassmen years - I needed a reminder of how far I've come since I first entered art school.

I can't guarantee I'll find the time to write much after this, but I'd like to. I know I'm in a weird spot in my life, and I really want this.

In the mean time, I'll share the finals I made as a senior.

These were from my concept art class. I really struggled to balance this class on top of my other projects because it was at the end of the week. I really wanted to push myself in this class, but I could only put minimum effort into these paintings.

This was my pet project though. It's a 3D sculpt made entirely in Zbrush. I wanted to make her realistic, but my classmates and professors pushed me to make her in my drawing style, so it was a super fun journey to explore my own style in 3D. I want to rerender her to fix the shadows and background before she goes in my portfolio.

I overscoped on this one! I misjudged how many weeks we had on our final project, so I chose to do a full character that I wanted to make game-ready, but I spent too much time on the environment (which you cant even see in the final render) that I just had to cut corners. The character was sculpted and posed in zbrush and the scene was lit and rendered in Maya. I still need to fix the rim lighting on the character - the lights were shining through the character but it's not a lighting class so I ditched it to polish the character for submission.




Overall, this was the one semester where I felt satisfied with all of my classes. I might be nervous about the future, but I really put my best into the past few months and I feel like I learned A LOT.
I'll have to post my other assignments when I have access to the files.

What to do in another world

I got to experience a really weird thing last week. I'm working on a new game team at school this semester, and we're working in virtual reality. We have tech that hasn't been released to the public yet, and it's really neat!

But, working in VR has a lot of things that you have to work around as you develop a game for it, especially with the specific tech we're using. Rooms can only be so big, you can't have horizontal movement, can't have chairs, and you can't have objects on the floor that players might walk through. 

I was warned what happens when you walk through objects in VR, but I wanted to experience it myself - can't be that bad, right? Nah. It was.

I put my leg through a box. My initial reaction was more along the lines of, "haha, this is strange, my whole body is telling me to move hahah okay, that was weird  hahahaha" but within the next 20 minutes, I felt so sick that I had to sit and stare at the wall for a few hours - retching, phantom pains, and the feeling of absolute dread. 

All in all, the after effects lasted for about 7 hours, but that was probably more on me. I couldn't handle the feelings of disphoria and depression, and I spent a lot of time pining over how bad I felt rather than how it was slowly going away.

It was a cool experience. Awful in the moment, but still a cool experience. 

I look forward to when I can share more about this project.

Feelings

POMM4

This was the last People On My Mind of the summer

(me i guess, some boy i used to know, someone who used to be my best friend, someone who seems out of place, and someone who's really special)

Black and White

Cafe Drawings

The first week of the semester, my advanced figure drawing teacher sent us out to do 50 cafe drawings in a week. It was super fun!

It helped me get back into the habit of carrying my sketchbook everywhere and seeing opportunities of drawing people/things. My friends and I took some time everyday to just sit in the school cafe or to go to the mall to draw people.

I feel like this assignment really pushed me, but I don't know what I got on it. My figure drawing teacher is new and doesn't know all of the policies yet (which includes giving us our grades after so many days of turning it in). Regardless, here are some of the 'best of's

Illustration Dump 8/1/14

This is the final REAL art dump from the past few months. 

some artist dude I dated for like a month

a twenty minute warm-up 

People on My Mind

Along the lines of trying to practice diversity, I've been trying to get away from "same face syndrome" where if you take away the hair of all the people you draw, you'll get the same person. It's a nasty habit to have as an artist.

I do things called "People on My Mind" about once a week where I draw the first couple of people who come to mind as I'm drawing. I feel weird sharing them in case anyone recognizes who I'm drawing, but they really are just 'people who pop into mind' as I'm drawing.

Some of my friends have fun guessing who's who, at least.

ft. some boy I used to know, a boy from a party, a pretty cool tall guy, and a girl everyone talks about 

ft. a guy who doesn't fit in, a friend I miss, another friend I miss, some boy I used to know, and an ex of an ex

OC swaps

I'm in the facebook group for the incoming BFA's. They had an OC (original character) swap one night, and I decided to join in. It was really fun! I really needed an excuse to practice full body poses!

Each character belongs to their respectful creator

Art dump 7/30/14

I've been really trying to practice diversity and personality in my drawings this summer. I've been doing a lot of gestures and model sheets to try and achieve that.

Art Dump 7/23/14

Here's some painty drawings I've done so far over the course of summer

Watercolors

I got into going out and painting with a little traveling watercolors set I had to get for a summer workshop class. Watercolors are uh??? hard????? but it's really nice to have to sit and think about it, and it was a nice review of my color theory class from this last Spring semester.

This is my second go. We went to the big Bellevue mall, got jamba juice, and sat in the sun for an hour or so. It wasn't really that good of an art day, and the second half of the painting looks like poop so I only took a picture of half of it (HA)

This one's my first attempt. We went to the Kirkland waterfront which is actually a really nice place to go! They have beaches and benches and a nice walking path along the water!

Game Team Cityscape

I really love working on a game team; it's been a super fulfilling experience. 

I haven't really done much because there's two other artists, but I was given a pretty big project to tackle this week. I had to draw a cityscape from a topdown view in only a few days. I didn't get as far as I had hoped, but after this Friday, I'll have more time to finalize it.

Click for full view!

Sketch

Color Blocking

Work In Progress Shot 1

First Final Draft

Hhhh

My favorite professor just started a club where we get three hours to just draw whatever we want, and if he's around, he'll come by and talk to us and maybe give us a critique.

This is what I did in the hour I went, but I had too much homework and had to go home before finishing

game team dump 1

I'm behind on my game team work. I'm the concept artist, so the other artists depend on me. Without the concepts I produce, they can't start their assignments. 

I'm only a day behind though, so it's not that bad.

Here's a bunch of stuff from my first deadline:

Color Palette

I'm supposed to get a t-shirt from them eventually too so I guess that's cool