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.

Giraffa Aquatica

it's finals week! and here's my Bio final!

Bio was a fantastic class, and I'm going to be TAing for the professor next semester as he teachers the freshmen human anatomy. I'm super excited!

Anyway, for my final, I had to come up with an imaginary animal, write an abstract on it, draw orthographics of its skeleton, and make a final illustration. I chose to create a semi-aquatic water giraffe (a giraffe-opotamus?) 

I'm pretty pleased with the background too; it could be better, of course, but looking back at the first background I painted in photoshop this last semester, I'm glad to see improvement.

I haven't gotten a grade for it yet, but my professor pulled it out of the submission pile in class and made some very nice comments, so I'm crossing my fingers! 

Sleepy Lemurs

I acknowledge that digital backgrounds are one of my major weaknesses.
For my Biology class, we have to study an animal that fits our current unit, draw orthographics of its skeleton, and do an illustration of said animal.

We can use any medium we want, but my Bio teacher warns us not to do digital because we haven't finished out first photoshop class yet, and if our photoshop teacher were to see them, they 'wouldn't get a passing grade'.

I got a pretty low grade on this, but that's partly because a series of unfortunate events made me turn it in late (my computer at school blue screened as I was submitting it and by the time it booted back up again, I was five minutes late).

I took it to my photoshop teacher after though, kind of disappointed. I asked how I could become a better environment artist and had a good long talk; I haven't had the chance to use what he taught me yet, but I'm excited anyway.

(and for the record, my photoshop teacher said, "if I were your Bio teacher, I would get this a professional grade" so... cool.)

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

Master Copy

This was our first assignment in my Photoshop class. We had to recreate a traditional piece of artwork digitally, trying to match textures and mediums. 

My professor told me it looked very professional and gave me a 96%

(original on left, mine on right)

Hey, it's me

Oh boy, I haven't written in so long that I've kind of been lost. I don't really remember the semester?? My school is such a time vacuum. Even though it feels like summer was just a few weeks ago, it also feels like I've been stuck in semester three for as long as I can remember.

Anyway, this year is focused on digital art and 3D modelling. It's hard. At last, 3D modelling is hard. Digital art is fine, and I love it and I feel totally 100% in my element.

My photoshop class has been going just fine, and here is one of my prouder accomplishments so far:

It's me! yee

Took me about 6 hours of sitting on my living room floor to paint, got 93%.

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

Game Team Showcase!

Well, my game team did it

Freshmen games aren't taken very seriously (for obvious reasons). I was told only one freshmen team gets onto the end of year student showcase, but I heard there's two others? Whatever, we still got onto the showcase too.

I'll share the link to the download as soon as it gets put on the school game gallery. I've played the intro, and it's super spooky!

I got behind on my work though, haaa. As an artist, I don't really get to hear any deadlines. All the programmers hear them in class and from their friends, so I think they just don't realize that the artists don't get the same treatment? Game teams aren't a requirement for us, so we hear literally nothing.

But, that meant I had to work 28 hours straight on my remaining work because SURPRISE! Everything had to be done right away. I don't mind, but there's a lot of things I wish I could have fixed/done differently. At least I know for the future?

I definitely have a goal to be more professional when it comes to deadlines; that's what I focused on already through all of this, but it didn't always work out as planned

Modified Walk and Run

We just finished our modified walk and run in animation this week. We had to come up with them ourselves, and it was really our first 'creative' project. A lot of it was spent learning how to make good enough video references, thumbnails, and plans to produce a solid product.

Some of my peers got really complicated with their animations, but I tried to keep mine simple

I haven't gotten a grade on them yet, but I'm not expecting much. I got caught up with my other assignments, so I didn't get to put as much time into them as I wanted. My animation class lands on a bad day of the week, workload-wise.

Walk and Run Cycles

Animation has been kicking my butt this semester. Pretty much my entire animation class revolves around walk and run cycles, which is actually really difficult?

We have to use that Zed character from the first assignment of the semester, but here's my first actual walk and runs from a few months ago: 

Puppets

I'm taking acting for animation this semester which is REALLY DIFFERENT. It took me a few weeks to feel comfortable, and even then, I still have my moments in that class where I just, "why am I here??"

It's basically an improv class that's supposed to help us become stronger animators, but it's rough.

well there you have it

I got asked to be on my first game team because of this dumb drawing.

I've been asked to be on game teams before, but I've always put down the offers. Freshmen aren't really supposed to seek out game teams because our schedules and classes don't mix, but those who pull it off are usually ahead come their sophomore year.

I've only met with the team once, but they're doing a survival horror game, and that's pretty rad! They don't need much from me as an artist, which is a huge plus, but I still get a team t-shirt (wink-wonk, free t-shirts)

Best part of the semester so far, though, even if it's been rough

Cups

The Salesman

My film class is super intense this semester! Last semester we just learned about the history of film making so we watched a lot of movies and wrote a lot of papers. This semester, it's all projects. Each week, we have to write scripts, draw storyboards, or shoot a film.

This week, I had to do a still film so my friends came over and helped out

It's all very out of my comfort zone, but my friends were very helpful! I'm very grateful.

It went very smoothly too; the worst part about shooting was one of my friends discovering his apartment had flooded with 2-3 inches of water while we were working. 

Happy Friday, right?

Art 101 Final Project - Cityscapes

More bad photos! I tried playing around with them in photoshop to make them a bit more clear.

These were my final projects for Art 101. We had to do two cityscapes - one a big city, one a small town, plus six thumbnails for each.

I did a ton of research. I really wanted to actually do something with this assignment, even though I ended up spending more time on research and not enough time actually executing the drawings.

But, I'm still proud of how they turned out. 

My big city drawing was based on Paris and London.

My small town was based on downtown Provo, Eureka, and Springville, Utah.

Each drawing had to include a list of specs - 10 trees, 10 buildings, 5 forms of landscape, 3 vehicles, 3 street signs, etc, etc.

I originally got an F though, because my professor didn't interpret the number of sidewalks on my big city drawing the same as me. I had to send him an email with a diagram pointing out each sidewalk, so he bumped my grade to barely passing.

I kind of feel like if I hadn't initially failed, I would have gotten a lot higher score; you can't tell in the pictures, but I felt the craftsmanship was very high, even if I didn't get as many details in as I wanted.

Oh well, I guess. I passed the class which is a big enough accomplishment within itself.

Bedroom Assignment

Camera phone pictures! That's why I never got around to putting these up in the first place! They're too big for my scanner (I believe it's 12" x 14"?)

This was an assignment for Art 101 back around October. My teacher really liked them! A lot! I got a B+ without even having to resubmit them, and he even gave me an extra assignment to add shadows and value to them, but time caught up to me and the farthest I got was adding some detail to one of the drawers.

We had to draw a corner in our bedroom twice though in two point perspective. It was really fun; it was the first time we applied our perspective lessons to something I felt I could relate to.

I think he expected us to keep our room the same in each drawing, but as I was finishing up the first, there was a huge spider that crawled up from behind my bed. My roommate tried killing it but only flung the spider onto my bed; I ended up cleaning my whole room after that and slept on the couch that night. 

Figure Drawing 1/19/2014 (NSFW)

I LOVE FIGURE DRAWING. I AM OBSESSED WITH FIGURE DRAWING.

I made it a goal to go at least once a week last semester, and I kept to that until winter break started. It's very therapeutic though - three hours of just staring at the human body nonstop, studying how it moves and works. IT MAKES ME FEEL SO PUMPED.

I'm taking a figure drawing class this semester though. I'm required to go to the open figure drawing sessions twice a week, and we're supposed to do figure drawing differently than I'm used to. Kinda stinks. I really like to just jump in and see how far I can render each drawing, but in my class, we're expected to do gestures, which are basically:

Our teacher is very particular. It took me a while to understand what he wanted, but this last class, I got a "Very nice" from him which is a huge step up, apparently haha.

We draw on huge 18" x 24" newsprint pads, and by the end of the semester, I guess we're supposed to have a huge stack filled with just our figure drawings.