weekly summary

This week we were given our new brief which is to do fictional art test. We all got to choose to do which ever test we wanted. The options where to do a character or environment and asset pieces in 2D and there was also a 3D or development art test too. I chose to go with 2D character design, with this you had to create a shopkeeper character themed from the 1990's game series 'Monkey Island'. The character had to have a normal state and a twilight state. The project consists of two final design drawings of normal/twilight state, callout sheet for both and concept pieces for both characters in their underwater temple shop. The art style for this project had to be like from the Telltale gaming company. I am really happy with this project as I really enjoy the Telltale games and I really like the style of the games too.

In this week’s Z brush session, I added more detail to my model, it is now starting to gain characteristic and looking more like a creature which I am happy with. I have added teeth, to do this I used the displace brush and then used the move brush to place the teeth in their right place. I added scale like textures to the model using alpha brushes and I added with horns using the snake hook brush, I found this was the easiest way to achieve the horns. I made the stomach thinner also, as before it was too bloated looking and did not look anatomically correct with the shell. I have also made the neck longer; my tutor had helped me with this. I do really enjoy Z brush but I am still finding my way around the programme, there is a lot to take in at times.

On Wednesday we had a contextual studies lecture on games as sports, we looked into the history of sports as games as way back as the Romans. Games back then were entertainment, I guess the same applies today, but sports had a big social side to them, hundreds and thousands of people would go to the Colosseum in Rome to watch fighting in the arena. We also looked at the E sports market size, the total global gaming market in 2015 was $74.2 billion, with E sports a massive $892 million (2016).

On the Thursday we had our last anatomy lecture, we looked at sex differences, proportions, body types. This was a good lecture to end with I felt by the end of the lecture I had a better understanding of the human body and its proportions and differences I will take this knowledge with me. 

At the end of the week we had our workshop session, in the session I mainly did research for what my final twilight character could look like and what form the character could take. Also by the Friday I had the final design for the normal state drawn out. I was given some guidance on how to approach the painting process in a telltale style. I decided to go with the telltale walking dead series, with a touch of the game 'The wolf among us'.

Art test Monkey Island.

Because I have enjoyed this project so far I wanted to get straight into the project so I felt like I have gotten quite far this week with this project.

 These are the body shapes that I was happy with, my final image was based on these body types.

These are just some rough head designs for my main final shopkeeper character.

 This is my final normal state character. I am very happy with this painting and the design of the character in general. I tried to keep the Monkey Island theme going in this painting, by making the character have a bigger upper body and smaller legs and feet, by what research I did do on the characters of the game I found that most of the male characters had a similar body type. Overall on this piece I think I got the theme quite close to the brief, the art style in the form of Telltale I did try but it was a lot more difficult that I had hoped. Overall I think the Telltale style does show through a little by the adding of the solid lines on parts of the figure.

This was the mood board piece I had done in my workshop session this week. I have decided to stick with this idea for my twilight final state design.

These are just a few quick sketches of some Twilight state head designs.