Year 2 - Week 7 - November 14th - 18th

This week we are drawing the urban environment.  Looking at the built up areas around Leicester and using perspective to help produce the work, similar to the 2 point perspective project in year 1. For me I like doing this project due to the fact that it’s about looking at perspective and everything in the built environment is blocky and square basically. This is the kind of things I like to draw since I cannot stand organic shapes and especially drawing trees! I could draw built environments all day long; I’ve gotten to like architecture quite a lot so this project is perfect. Recently I’ve decided to keep a sketch book based on perspective drawings, so basically drawing the built environment or blocky objects in perspective. I understand perspective a lot and beginning to be quite obsessed with it applying it in nearly everything I draw. Something I struggle with is textures, I can’t render them to save my life, I just apply lighting wherever I see it to what I draw and that’s enough for me. I don’t know what it is, I can draw pretty much anything but no matter how hard I try and even researched on how to draw textures better... I just can’t, I’m trying to understand but can’t. My style of drawing, painting and adding tone I would say is quite different from others, the main thing to remember is that there isn’t just one way to draw, paint or even sculpt etc, we all have different styles so I’m not going to let it get to me. One thing we’ve been told is that we can add a bit of stylisation to our work which I thought we could anyway... I got confused by this, in which I thought we could stylise any drawing we wanted already, I think I understand it means we must draw in our own style and can only add a bit of others styles...

The Urban Environment

In 3D we’ve started on our self portrait project, this is the one I’ve been dreading because not only do I hate taking pictures of myself or people drawing me, but modelling myself seems a bit too far for my liking... How I plan to do this project is by making a high poly versions and then taking out edges and vertexes to where not needed to make the LOD version. I’m going to need all the time I’ve got on this since I hate modelling characters, ever since the gladiator project it made me never want to model or design characters ever again!

No critical studies again; one thing I wanted to talk about was the Concept Art workshop from week. It was good to hear about things from a former student about life in industry, I thought being a concept Artist would be a cool job to have before I came here but I wasn’t too sure about it, in terms of what more do you do in the job role other than drawing, and as it turns out you do a lot of 3D speed modelling work and manipulate images from 3D to put into 2D and paint over them which is cool, it would be good to use that technique possibly in the Queens building project coming up soon. Mitch (the guy who came in) talked a lot about the planning and processes of what it takes to be a concept Artist, he even said that you get told that your work is total crap quite a lot so it’s heart breaking, which has definitely made up my mind of not wanting to be a concept Artist, I couldn’t handle that, I want to work in a nice friendly environment (if it exists!) not a harsh one where I’m being told whatever I produce is crap all the time...

He even said that they cheat all the time in their work, which I was quite shocked to hear, but I guess when you get to industry level you can do whatever you want...