20/04/2016 - The End

Week......something (15 I think)

The End

Today marks the end for my three final characters for this project, Wednesday, the 20th of April 2016.

after the feedback from my presentation, I have compiled my characters into posters to best represent them as final pieces. Before I get to them  though I still have some iterations of my characters still to blog here.

I should note that I never followed through with the physical pieces for my final characters, it just didn't feel correct to create physical pieces with these characters. I do feel that "Hunger" the most would have been the most appropriate to create a physical piece from, I could have seen her carved into a rock to warn travelers. I have however added the same sort of context to the final designs kind of based on the research I did for the physical pieces earlier in the semester. 

The Minotaur: 

01:

This is the latest version I have on my blog before today. This design was an inspired design I painted in about half an hour with some influence from Picasso. It gave me the freedom in my mind to just go for an eccentric design. This design does contrast what my original intentions were but his design does reflect the change in my mindset from the beginning of this project. I have definitely grown as an artist and I would have never have gone for a design like this before. The biggest development for me mentally is that I feel I can now produce a piece of "art" that I actually feel fits into art as a whole. I haven't just felt like I was pretending to give context to my work (like in previous modules) but I genuinely considered historical context and art context when design all three of my characters.

02:

This was an alternative design, I took away all the colour from the first and just added one base colour. I then erased a thin white outline of him to make him stand out against the background. This shows The Minotaur in his purest form.

03:

This design is where I have tried to reflect the half man, half bull aspect of him. The patches of solid colour reflect human skin and the more spread out colours represent where the human skin is blending with the bull skin.The solid brown is of course representing the bull skin. I like this design but I simply prefer the previous designs.

04:

I just created this design since I was already in the brown theme after creating the one above. I admit that it totally doesn't work. The mess of colours is too distracting from the line work.

05:

So this is my final design. I have combined the design that I started with today and with the one of the block colour to get this result below. I really like the pop art vibe that I have created. Its a massive contrast to what I originally intended....and its a massive contrast to The Minotaur in Greek culture. In all of my research I haven't come across such an interpretation of The Minotaur and I consider this to be a success. In my eyes, I have created a piece of work that is unique for The Minotaur.

The Arch Rogue:

01:

This is the design for The Arch Rogue that I started with today. I like the different shades of brown used to render him in. This creates a sort of unity to harmonize with the triangular shapes through his figure.

02:

This is more of the design process that led me to the image below this one. This image though shows that I took pictures of an old barbecue and bike gear and used them for my character....

...This image below is my final design. I applied the images I took as an "overlay" layer in Photoshop to get this effect. You can see that there is still a difference in tone where there was a darker shade of brown. The reasoning behind adding these textures was because The Arch Rogue is a German folk tale, so I wanted to represent his German culture into his design by giving him an industrial inspired texture. This has been me wanting to give him more context to exist as a final piece of work.

 "Hunger":

01:

This is the design of "Hunger" that I started today with. I haven't changed her design but I have given her the context which she craves so much. 

02:

I decided to give her a paper background, I simply crumbled up a piece of paper and took a photo of it and applied it as an overlay.

03:

I then decided that I wanted some doodles on the paper to add more character to it. I originally tried just doing this straight into Photoshop but it didn't look natural so I did them onto the actual piece of paper and took another photo of it. The context behind this is how the Greek characters of old are absorbed into our own culture and there influence can be seen throughout the world. So I have placed "Hunger" on a page of doodles as a contrast of the culture of Ancient Greece and the modern day world...there may be a massive difference between the two ages but ultimately, they are the same world. I would say that "Hunger" looks kind of depressed at being in a world such as todays...so far away from her own time.

Final Pieces:

These are my final pieces for this project, I have put them in a sort of poster format along with the description of there physical appearance from their respective stories that I have been working from to get them to where they are now.

The Arch Rogue:

The Minotaur:

"Hunger":

Summary:

I have developed a lot as an artist over the last year, I have gained more confidence in what I am doing and why I am doing it. This has been the most important lesson from this module.

As for my characters, I am pleased with how they have all ended up, I may have had some confidence issues in semester 1 regarding how well I would be able to actually paint them but I kept looking at new sources of inspiration and this really helped me to forget about my own limits and just push regardless.

13/04/2016 - Presentation Feedback

Week 14

Presentation Feedback

Feedback

I have not posted anything on this blog for a few weeks because of a focus on other modules during the Easter break.

Today though I had my final presentation and this post of for my feedback. 

It was mentioned that the research I did into Picasso and using him as an influence worked well and was evident in my final line work for The Minotaur.

It was also mentioned by one of the lecturers that he couldn't picture the characters existing in a 3D space or being animated and he questioned me on the final purpose of these characters. At the time I didn't have a response to that but having some time to think it over, I have an answer. Basically, I feel the lecturer thought that the final characters were intended for maybe some final illustrations or maybe that I would generate some sort of model sheets so that they could be ready for animation or used as reference to be modeled in 3D. I had not thought about any of this that much for this project, at most, I thought the characters would perhaps be used in animations if I continued them...but like I said, having thought about this, I feel that these characters have allowed me to grow as an artist. at the start of this project I could say that I didn't really feel like an artist, but having done lots of research into other artists and by analyzing them and using them as inspiration I feel more of an artist. This has resulted in me seeing this project more as an art piece rather than something for animation or games. So my final pieces for this project is going to be each of my final characters on a digital poster design with a character description underneath to give them context.

Another piece of feedback was that the process I used on The Minotaur is something I should use on future character and that the way I implemented my influences from Picasso will improve myself as an artist. This feedback is something I will certainly look to implement in future projects, specifically with animations as there are plenty of animators with their own distinct animation/visual style. 

A personal piece of feedback of myself is that I took too long to experiment with colour and I should of just jumped in with it in the early days of semester 2. This for me, is one of the crucial elements that I did not implement and I believe I didn't commit to it because of my lack of practice when it comes to experimenting with colour.

Summary

I am going to create some final digital posters for my final characters along with some text from the myths they are from. I have also learnt a lot from doing this project up to this point and I hope to do a final reflective post by the end.