Month 5: Shading and Lighting/ Art 2

This month was another busy one, but not like last month. My original schedule had me in shading and lighting lab 5am-9am with the lecture portion of the class from 1pm-5pm. I did that for 1 day and then was extremely lucky in that I overheard a guy behind me in lecture that needed to switch to the early lab because of his job. So after that I was 9-5 every day. Art 2 was also 9-5, so no stressful hours this month. 

Art 2 was great! I guess I was skeptical that I could really improve much with a month of art class, but this class really helped. Unlike Art 1, for Art 2 we only worked on 1 piece for each project (more or less). The projects were perspective/figures in action/figure drawing/zoo/character sheet/maquette figure. Also unlike last month instead of of a chunk of our grade being "effort", our entire grade was based on our final portfolio.

With our first project we started of where we left of in Art 1, perspective.

For this project we were to create a fictional city using 2 point perspective. So you pick 2 points on your paper that are on the same horizontal line and draw some guidelines expanding out in every direction from each point. My left point was off the paper and my right point was on the far right of the paper.

Perspective Piece



I had the teacher approve the castle idea, and he really liked how this turned out. This was the only 100% I received on any of my art projects, they kept this one for the gallery.

Next we did figures in action. Our class broke up into groups and went outside and made about twenty 10 second movies doing movements based on the ideas of Action/Tragedy/Drama and Mystery. We then picked 2 of our favorites and drew them out using line of action and construction shapes. There really was not a whole lot to do in this project because we were supposed to leave all the construction line work intact, so this project did not get a whole lotta love.


The lion tamer action animation is me.

Figures in Action

Next we had 2 entire days of nude figure drawing, we were provided a large drawing pad of butchers paper that we completely filled up within the 2 days.  Day 1 was a male model, day 2 was the female. Both days were fast paced and a little stressful. The longest we had on any 1 pose was 10 minutes. Most of the poses were 15 seconds-1 minute, so we were burning through the sketch pad. This project I did the worst on (88) but actually made the most improvement. Drawing people, or figures was something I did not really want, or know how to do. However, I now have a solid approach to it, and enjoy it. The turn in was just our entire pad.

Here is a panoramic of the classroom set up for the models, as well of some of my drawings.






After that was out of the way we all met up at the zoo for class one day mid month. It was HOT.... and HUMID and we had to fill up a 40 page sketch book with animal drawings. Besides the gross weather it was nice to get out of the classroom. Besides the 40 page sketchbook, we also had to work on a project involving the zoo. The one that most the class chose, including myself was to create a mythological creature combining at least 3 animals together. The idea was to keep it believable pulling 90% of the attributes from one animal and 10% from the others.
This is supposed to be a black handed spider monkey with striped texture, piranha teeth, and horns. This got really high marks, and was also kept by the school.

Zoo Project
 

Next we did character sheets. For this we first were provided a theme (pirates vs Atlantians) and a small random pictures of characters to base our characters around. Mine was some weird goat wearing a robe. My character ended up being a female Atlantian villain. Character drawing really is not my niche, so this project was a pain. For the final sheet we needed 5 expressions, 5 canon shots, 3 silhouettes, and a 3 point turnaround.

Character Sheet


Home made ghetto tracing table that I made so I wouldn't have to go into open lab after hours.



For our final project we had to pick out a silhouette from our character sheet and build a sculpey clay maquette to match the silhouette.. This project was great, the only bad thing is we had very little time for it. It came in the last week, which was a very busy one in both classes. I took several pictures to show the process of how it was made. For my first clay project, I was very happy with how it turned out. It could have been a lot better if I had more time, and the proportions were a bit more accurate, but I thought it was one of the cooler ones in the class.
Here are some pictures of the progression.









this was right before she got baked

There were many really great artists in this class. The guy that sat next to me wants to be a concept artist, and actually has the skills to do it, ...probably now if he wanted. His stuff was pretty unbelievable, I had thought that his laptops background was a photo of a young girl tell I started talking to him, and found out that he had made it. 

So that was Art 2, next month is Method of Design and then that is all for the art classes. It kinda sux, but its also kind of a relief.

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My next class was shading and lighting. Shading and lighting is pretty much what it sound like. This class starts out teaching us how to properly light scenes. We learn about all the different kinds of lights, and how to adjust their shadows. The second half of the class focuses on creating photo realistic textures either using techniques within the software, or by using patterns taken from photographs and manipulated within photoshop.

Here were a few of the lighting projects. We were provided a reference image and told to match the lights, light color, shadows, and shadow softness. These scenes have 3-5 lights in them.

This was our first texturing project, we had to first match lights, we then had to create all the textures for the scene. This became complicated when you take into account all the small things like reflectivity, glossiness, and the grooves and depth that are in different textures. Here is a picture of the reference image I was provided with, followed my my project render.


REFERENCE PROVIDED

MY RENDER

still have not got back grades for any of the following projects.

The next project we worked on focused on matching to a photograph, so it was much more difficult, if not impossible to match a lot of the textures. Here we started to dabble with glass, leather, and brushed metal.

Here is what we started with


After texturing and rendering


Our last project was a cafe scene, in this we had some artistic freedom and did not have to match reference. We were just handed a list of what we need to do for each object in the scene. We also used photoshop a bit, and touched on 3d projections a bit.

Cafe Scene


Then there was a final written test, and an in class practical today that was pretty stressful. I was happy with the outcome and think I did well with it.
Overall I really liked the class. I plan on expanding on the content that we learned, as it can really make the work look stunning when done well.

So that was my month. Next month I have method of design by itself because transfer credits got me out of taking college mathematics.

Month 4: Model Creation/Art 1

So, this was a busy month. This month I had two classes and zero free time. The hours were very good though, 9-5 every day except Sunday. This is also the first pairing of classes where both classes were very demanding on time, causing a lot of drop outs. I would say about 1/3rd of the students either dropped, or failed 1 or both classes. Ill talk about Art 1 first.

Art 1 revolves around 5 art principles, Line/value&shape/proportion&scale/texture&pattern/color. For each of these principles we had to accumulate 9 points worth of projects.  We are gave lists of projects ranging in difficulty, and point value. Some may choose to do nine 1 point beginner projects, while more experienced artists may choose to do one 9 point professional project. Between each of the principles our mentors would go through our work, and select one piece from each category for our final portfolio that would be worth 60% of our grade. Here are a few of the better ones.

Line
 
Value





Texture

Color

The course director really liked the divers helmet, and the dog by the window, so they will be displayed in the schools art gallery. Value was for sure my favorite. 

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The other class I had was model creation (MCR). This class takes the very basic modeling we did in 3DF and expands on it ten fold. The course director/lecturer used to work for Disney, and was a molder/animator for Stitch from Lelo and Stitch.

The class is composed of four projects. Project 1 we model about 9 objects from a predetermined list for a garage.

Project 2 we learn about smoothing out our objects to model and populate a cafe scene. This project demands higher quality objects, and more objects.

Umbrella for my scene (took about 7 hours)


The 3rd project is related to textured and kind of unrelated to modeling.

The final project is really the nuggets of the class, and we get the last week and a half of the month to work on it. We are supposed to choose a picture of a room from 1 of 3 difficulties. There is no advantage to choosing a more difficult room besides to challenge yourself. Each of the three difficulties has about 3-5 rooms to choose from. I chose a Tier 1 (most difficult) room called the Loft.
 This was my reference Picture



The rooms are graded on many many aspects of technical, professional, and artistic requirements, and have to match the shot camera exactly.

Here is an early version of my office chair.


 Completed scene in wireframe

This is a completed scene that I lit and rendered.... lighting and rendering was not necessary for the project, but I wanted to see it pop.

This labor of love took around 100 hours. Had I known what I was doing I probably could have done it in half the time.



Ok so.... apparently my efforts were noticed because I came out of these classes with two awards that I did not even know existed. Frank (the MCR director) pulled me aside to thank me for showing what can be done in a month from someone who really goes after it. He said he has only gave out 5 100%s on a final in his years of teaching the course, and this may be another. He said he was going to award me the course directors award! Im not exactly sure what that is, but it sounds pretty hot.

ALSO, I received an email from the art course director Brian yesterday letting me know he was nominating me for the advanced achiever award.  This award goes to 1 person every graduating class, so I guess its cool that I have been nominated. Again im not exactly sure what that award means, but its probably on the schools website somewhere.

Outside of class I really had almost no time. For the first 20 days of the month I only slept about 4 hours each day, no complaints though.  My car was hit by another student driver who was on his cell phone and in a hurry. (his insurance is paying for damages)

and my credit card was used by someone in Saint Cloud Florida! That cards been cancelled and I'm getting my money back.

Hmmm.... so that's been my busy month, next month is Art 2 and Shading and Lighting.