Week 2 – Still life

Have two more drawings.

Week 2 | Still life & my mortal enemy

Monday, tired. No lecture. Bed tempting, but lets draw a little instead!

Car

lights

material studies

The car was drawn with ink and 45 Pencil. I’ve always been notoriously bad at drawing vehicles, so this is my chance. Manmade creations are hard. Reflections are hard. Yet this is the prettiest car I’ve drawn in my life. It makes it REALLY obvious that I have a lot of room for improvement! Second, drew some car lights with different mediums; hard crayons, ink and markers, soft crayons (with blue!) and charcoal. Lastly, I drew some balls with various materials, using pencils. Being not too familiar nor comfortable with traditional drawing, this is definitely something I should do more. I’m relatively happy with the fur, but many of those material balls are of poor quality in my honest opinion.

Also did some quick <30 second force drawings. I am currently reading through the Force: Dynamic life drawing for animators, and tried to keep Mattesi’s tips and tricks in mind while doing so.

<30 sec sketches

<30 sec sketches

<30 sec sketches

<30 sec sketches

<30 sec sketches

Week 1

First drawing of the day, 3 minutes

First thing I realized was that I’m much too careful when I start sketching. I also used a very hard Hsomething pencil, which ultimately shows that it’s quite difficult to see the sketch outline.

Second drawing of the day, 3 minutes

Same issue with the pencil. This time we were asked to include everything within those three minutes, and although I’ve spent less time on the outline, and it didn’t noticeably suffer much I think. However, the sketch here is barely visible due to smudging from drawing number three, because I naturally forgot a fixative. Lesson has been learned.

Third drawing of the day, 3 or 5 minutes

I tried my hand with charcoil, and it was a smudgy experience to say the least. I While the basic details and outlines are alright, it was a very different experience as to using an usual pencil. Charcoil is less forgiving, and it wouldn’t make it very easy for me to fill inn finer details later on.

Fourth drawing of the day, 5-10 minutes

Cannot remember time spent, unfortunately, but I attempted to focus more detail into this one. Was seated in a more difficult spot as well, with a few student heads in the way.

Fifth drawing of the day, 10-15 mins

The objective was to choose a small part of the still life composition and add detail to it. I decided to draw with ink this time around. Although this an unforgiving medium, I find that ink is one of my favorite traditional medium to draw with.

Sixth drawing of the day, 15-20 minutes

Sketched up with a hard pencil first, then started retracing and adding shade and some more detail with a softer B pencil.

 

Later today I also attended an hour of the live drawing. I didn’t stay until the end as I seem to be developing a cold.Also drew some drawings from picture references for Inktober!

15 minute

5 minute

Wall-E

Seagull hatchling

 

25 – 05

These days I am accepting a few small individual commissions to practice anatomy and… because of the nature of these particular commissions, fur! I think they are coming along nicely. It reminds me of how far I’ve come in one year.

 

I am currently still working some on the graduation movie that my group created for our final year project, and I am also plotting a few own personal projects that I wish to do this summer to expand my knowledge and expertise in both 2D and 3D.

I’ve also created a website for my portfolio, which can be found here:

http://mareie.wix.com/thebizarresuite

 

 

The Casualty

I am proud to present my final year group short film.

The Casualty is a short film about Tazio Nuvolari as a young man in WW1 several years before he became known as one of the greatest racing drivers that Italy has ever seen. The short is rendered with toon shader and AO and the textures are inspired by the art deco style of that era.

This product was the Final Year Group Project for BA (Hons) Computer Character Animation at Teesside University 2015 – 2016.

I was the art director of this project. My pre-production roles were character and environment concept artist and storyboard artist. In the production stage, I was the texturer and I also was responsible for the audio mix and documentation/project log. My showreels for this project are available below.

Dream Walker – a visual development art book

For my Final Year Project for BA (Hons) Computer Character Animation at Teesside University 2015-2016, I created a visual development art book for a potential animation film production. 

My main goal was to learn more about the visual stages of pre-production, and I wished to improve my digital design skills. 

The end product is a physical art book with concept art and information about selected characters, creatures, environments and props of the story, Dream Walker. The book’s volume is 61 pages.

There is also a digital version of the book, which is available via link here.

I have created a very short reel of concept motion art, where I have animated layers and added some particles to the artworks via Adobe After Effects. The reel is embedded below.

The Dream Walker story remains an active project of mine, and I hope to further expand the idea and its concepts and one day produce it.

Week 24 – Image batch

ExpoTees 2016 & Week 23

Expotees 2016

Earlier today I learned that several of my fellow students have been accepted into ExpoTees, and I was positive that I would not be amongst the lucky ones to be accepted. After checking my University email, I am surprised and happy to announce that I have been accepted to exhibit at ExpoTees in May 2016! I am really excited about this, and it definitely gives an extra motivational boost, which is most welcome at this time when the deadline for the project is rapidly approaching! 🙂

Further Environment Design

These are some older drawings of the first environments!

I am currently working on the third environment. The environment focus is death and decay. I have found inspiration in WW environments. No flora grows here and the flourish of colours seen in the other environments is replaced by browns. Note the Watcher has finally been added to his natural environment on the picture to the left.

The Watcher

The watcher is another nightmare design. The lesser nightmares represent physical force, and the medium nightmares represent psychic powers. He is one of a kind, stalking the dead territories where the nightmare presence has sucked all life out of the land.

Slow and stiff of movement, he patrols the deceased landscape, relatively easy to spot because of the lantern he carries along with him. He will not chase or physical attack intruders. He shares an active psychic connection with other nightmares however, and once his watchful eye has found an intruding presence, every nightmare creature in the relative area will be telepathically notified and drawn to their location.

Short and sweet, you don’t want to be caught by this guy.

 

Designing the Art Book

I am currently designing the book itself, using Blurb’s own program to set it together. It’s a very interesting process to say the least. I realize that I should have done this earlier in order to better distinguish what added visual art I should add in order to create an attractive design and appearance for the book. Either way, progress is moving along nicely. I will have to cut, rescale and amend several of my existing works to achieve the appearance I desire.

 

Week 21 Progress, P1

This week is Animex 2016 week, and there will not be much time to work on the project. I have signed up on Dave Paget’s workshop: Digital Painting: The fundamentals of Environment Development. I am certain I will learn a lot from this session, and am looking very much forward to it. I remain very new to environmental art, but I have discovered that I am truly starting to like it when I in the very beginning outright disliked it.

This week I’ll finally be focusing some on props, both for characters and environmental, and flora.

FLORA

More to come, naturally! There will be further visual designs truer to previously posted plant sketches, coloured. More flora will also be introduced.

 

Environmental Props

Scattered about this realm of dreams, there are runestones with infused gems. These stones are typically found standing on elevated ground in clearings or meadows. They act as doors between this realm and the dreams of sleeping human beings, where thoughts, ideas and dreams pass to their rightful, sleeping recipients.

 

I also plan to rewrite and post a better in-depth version of my project’s plot and story. A near finished version has been in existence since the early weeks of the projects, but have not been cleaned up and posted to my blog.

Week 20 Progress

Finished t-pose, expressionboard and concept art for Yuri, the tangible memory of the protagonist’s dead sister.

I have also completed another piece of concept art for the forest environment, catching a glimpse of a wandering isle in the distance.