Gnomon Term 4!

Term 4! So there was a ton to absorb this term, but I'm going to just show some pieces from Visual Structure and Character Modeling, since those turned out to be my favorite projects. For visual structure, we were given a fantasy young adult novel and had 2 weeks to read it. We chose a project (whatever we wanted) and spent the rest of the term developing a pitch for it. I read The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper, and turned it into a graphic novel.

Here were some quick initial story sketches that I drew out after first finishing the reading - at this point I had already established that the color scheme would be a combination of cool blues + deep vivid reds, to match the dreamy writing style and structure of the novel. Also I felt keeping the colors simple would help emphasize the struggle of the Light vs. the Dark, which was the core plot.

The next step was to go ahead and apply color while sketching out some environments:

 Then was the fun part! Characters! I had some trouble with this at first, because the main character is a young child who's a bit devoid of individuality....there just wasn't a lot of description for him, I assume because the target audience would be children wanting to imagine themselves in his place while reading. So I took a look at the main antagonist that he was facing, who had a very specific description. Protagonists and antagonists tend to share subtle personality similarities with a striking visual contrast, and the main villain was meant to be a tall, skinny somber rider, cloaked in a massive cape to compensate. I ended up trying to match that vulnerability/compensating factor by using Will's winter wear as a sort of armor/shell.

By this point I had written out an outline for what each page would contain, and sketched out the placement for text boxes. Now I had to take one of the pages and push it as far as I could before the final presentation. Soooo here's the initial sketch I had, and next to it is the final version that I showed (there were actually no speech bubbles in this scene). 

And now, hello term 5!

Gnomon Term 3!

Some various work from this term - I suffered a huge harddrive crash right after this term, and lost my hardsurface projects. Lesson learned, backup often.

Hardsurface 2 - I spent the majority of my time on this class. We had 2 projects for the term, to build in high res. I modeled a F117 Nighthawk for the first, and IG-88 for the second. I did a simple mental ray lighting for IG-88, but no textures.

Next, character design - we had weekly drawing assignments with restrictions for this class. A couple of these were for an interpretation of Alice in Wonderland, the 3rd was for an interpretation of the Mayan "mars beast."

And finally, Digital Sculpting - this was the first time I'd gotten a chance to use Zbrush. We spent this course learning the software and producing an underwater themed creature. 

Figure/Life Drawings/studies

Just various. Some from life, some not. Fish from life.