Art School Confidential

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Fall Quarter 2012: Background Design & Layout

This class centered on working on background pieces to be used as backdrops for animation or real-life special effects based backgrounds for film. Two approaches were used, both photo manipulation and then digital painting techniques to achieve a matte painting effect.

Project 1: Haunted House (photo manipulation)

For this project we had to take a photo of a new house and dirty it up and modify it in Photoshop so it looked haunted.

Project 2: Midterm Project Floating city

We had to select an architectural style and turn it into a floating city via digital painting. I chose a castle style and turned it into the scene above. We had to render a sunset and night scene of the same floating city.

Project 3: Monk and waterfalls

For this project we followed a template to render a photo manipulation of a Monk stading before waterfalls and an ancient temple/city complex. We had to blend many elements into the scene: monk, tree, steps, waterfalls, mountains and various photos of mosques to render the city portion.

Project 4: Merman

For this project we had to use photo manipulation and a tutorial to create a scene of a Merman and fish. This is all layered photography and filters to create the scene.

Project 5: Futuristic Lab

For this project we had to work from the Professor's sketch and create a futuristic laboratory as seen through a window. This wan an exercise in digital painting.

Final Project: Underwater City

For this project we used photo manipulation to render an underwater scene again. This time we had to render an underwater ruin with a modern city in the background. The foreground was to be composed of a household item transformed into a submarine. I used an electric knife as the base for the submarine and added various elements to make it more submarine looking.

Fall Quarter 2012: Life Drawing & Gesture

This was one of my favorite classes, actually all of the traditional art drawing classes have been great. We had studio time each week where we did 4 hours of figure drawing. This course centered around rendering the figure in charcoal sticks on paper (no pencils). I have to admit it was a challenge as charcoal sticks/blocks don't offer the same control as a pencil, but with that in mind it was fun to get my hands dirty and work on paper again, and see how accurate I could be without the use of a pencil. All artwork is charcoal (vine and compressed) on 18x24 drawing paper. Building on that we had special projects throughout the quarter:

Project 1: Self Portrait

For this project we had to render a self-portrait where you present yourself in another setting, time etc. I did this one based off of a photo still from the TV series A Game of Thrones.

Project 2: Chiaroscuro Painting or Sculpture Reproduction

For this project we could choose to reproduce a Chiaroscuro painting or a rendering of a famous Greek/Roman statue. I chose to render a statue of Hercules from the Met in NYC.

Project 3: Fairytale/Nursery Rhyme/Fantasy Book Cover

For this project we had to create a rendition of a book cover based on a Fairytale or Nursery Rhyme. I chose Tom Thumb. There are many renditions of the story, but the one I chose is where he battles a spider. So I played with that and playing on Tom's size used a spool of thread as a seat and a needle for his sword.

Project 4: 5 figures in motion

For this piece, we had to work on a motion sequence showing a figure at five different stages of the same motion. For this I used the early sequential photography of Eadweard James Muybridge as inspriation and put the figure of a man throwing a punch against a Frank Frazetta inspired backdrop.

Summer Quarter 2012: Digital Ink & Paint

For this Class, we were tasked with various digital painting tasks, ranging from photo manipulation to actually coloring comic pages using various techniques in Photoshop.

Marilyn Monroe (Reference Photo from Google search)

Marilyn Monroe Jaguar Woman (Photo Manipulation)

For this project we had to merge Marilyn Monroe with the features of a Jaguar in order to create a cat-person.

Captain Kirk on modified background

For this project we had to cut out Captain Kirk and stick him on a modified background where we created the texture and lighting.

Packaging Design

On this project we had to design a product package from our imagination. I cam up with Spooky Spooners ceral from Cereal Killerz Cereal company.

Me as an animal person

We had to transform ourselves into an animal person for homework one class. I merged a tiger with a photo of myself to get this result. We had to match the lighting in our photo to the animal photo and I think it worked out pretty seamlessly.

Comic Cover Painting:

For this project we had to take an existing comic cover and color it digitally in photoshop from a black and white scan of the original artwork.

Comic Cover Painting:

Same as the previous image, we had to take an original scan of a black and white comic artwork and color it and this time add our own wording to the image.

Class Exercise:

For this one we played with color settings as well as various tools in photoshop like posterize to modify the image of the Statue of Liberty.

Class Exercise:

Same as the above image of Liberty, we took the filters a step further and morphed existing photography and effects to create a demon/zombie guy and add text to the image in a comic panel style.

Coloring Page:

Similar to the comic covers, we had to take the existing artwork of Bruce Timm and color the image as an exercise in class. This is my rendition with Batgirl looking more like the current Batwoman. I like the color scheme better.

Final Project: Graphic Novel Page

For the final project, we had to take an original image composition of our choosing and tell a page from a comic book/graphic novel of our own creation. For this I chose an image I commissioned from the talented Argentine comic artist, Tomas Giorello (DC Comics, Conan for Dark Horse Comics). The image portrays two of my original characters in a battle pose. The artwork is to be featured in the gallery section of the comic project I am working on. After I finish school I will devote more free time to development and completion of the project for hoped-for publishing in 2014/2015. The image takes Tomas' pencils and I inked over them digitally then painted in tons of layers on photoshop. I used an antique paper scan as the backdrop for the scene.

Summer Quarter 2012: 3-D Modeling

For the Summer Quarter, I took my first 3-D animation class that utilized Studio 3D Max as the program. I've never used a computer 3D program before and it shows painfully in projects for the class. Maybe it's being trained in 2D techniques all my life that it seemed so hard. I don't know, but the projects for the Quarter aren't my usual, but here for critique and history: