Visual Design Progression part 2

So after learning 1 point perspective then 2 point perspective followed by rendering techniques we had to use those skills when drawing cars. I was really surprised to how difficult it is just to draw a car that looks similar to the original, it was so easy to make the front to long or the whole thing to tall and it to look like a completely different car and not the one you are meant to be drawing.

I think this was quite a successful project. I tried working faster than I usually do by doing 5 to 10 minute sketches then longer ones where I worked on rendering too until probably my fastest Final piece so far. I think there are a few mistakes like the back wheel and roof but I'm happy with it as it does look like the car I was drawing and I got to try and replicate shinier surfaces with my shading though I'm still not sure if I'm adding enough contrast. After this we went on the great trek to Bradgate.

I spent quite a while practicing drawing trees whilst there, really wanting to make sure I had cracked drawing them as they annoyed me so much in the first few weeks. Though with learning how to draw trees I now have to draw all the lovely branches and impressions of leaves. This helped me with the final as if I hadn't picked up those skills I would never have been able to pull this off with having old john coming through the branches and leaves. The wall was very difficult trying to quickly replicate the stones and I'm not sure if I have pulled it off. So after this what did we draw next? Well we went to the pumpworks museumfor more rendering and perspective practice.

Finally I think I can use a 6B pencil efficiently... so much that a 6B pencil was sacrificed in the making of this final piece as I sharpened it so much it was too small too use by the end of it. I'm really happy with this final piece well the main structure... all the white space and things I still probably need to work on. But it has a good amount of contrast which I'm glad about since its lacking in most of my others.

The last week was working on still life models. We were given a limited amount of time on each set-up and due to this I wasn't able to do as much as I would have liked as I work quite slowly. I need to get faster I think that is what I plan on working on next and refining my perspective and rendering skills further. But I think I've made quite a bit of progress since that first Canal project. Lets hope I keep improving.

Game Writing

The world of reviews, previews and all things game related is quite a weird one I suppose. I'm a follower of IGN and I like to check up on there every now and again to see how games are fairing and the latest announcements. For a year I probably stayed up to date with the gaming magazine Gamestm , it was nice whilst it lasted but its £5 price tag took its toll and was eventually dropped for it. What I did with the magazines after that.... well I cut them up and used them in my sketchbooks. But anyway....

                                                                 The issue I started with.
The good thing about Gamestm in comparison to just reading for free off ign was that I had everything in nice little sections; some short stories near the front, previews, reviews, then a retro section near the back and video game art pages between each section. It was nice but I don't think I ever fully read through an issue just about 15 pages of it. I've also realised that instead of forking out £5 to read just some of the articles I could just quickly flick through the magazine to the pages I wanted to look at and never have to buy it.

In regards to their reviews, I valued them more than ign's just because I was paying for theirs so it had to be better right? But I found myself every time just comparing igns reviews against Gamestm and they would almost always come out the same. Yet there I was freaking out whenever any of the games I was following appeared in the magazine and got a good review. Now that I think about it though I was just paying for them to tell me that a game was good. If they had reviewed a popular game negatively their followers might be angry and they may lose costomers. I can say that I have also bought games just due to them receiving good reviews. I would never have bought them otherwise so maybe they are useful for showing off some of the best games out there. But then what if those reviewers are being bribed by the games companies?

 Games I bought purely due to their good reviews

The majority of reviews I have ever read are purely objective just telling me the different elements and why they work or dont work. I had never seen a subjective game writing until I read "Bow, nigger". Its such an unusual take on a game and feels more like a short story than anything else but it really gives you a feel for that gamer and what hes experiencing in the game rather than the games individual elements. It makes you think how people spend so much time in a game rather than how good a game is by its individual elements. 

Though I'm a bit of a nit picker myself and I like to try to explain all the different things, maybe to make it clear to myself  so I'm probably more of an objective writer. Thats not to say that subjective writing isn't valuable, to be honest it would be nice to be more subjective with my writing but I don't think I'm a skilled enough writer to pull it off. So I'll just keep pulling stuff apart and trying to explain my experiences to you aswell as the facts.

Visual Design Progression

So I wanted to do an update on how my drawings and things have been going. But first I guess I should show you some of the drawings I did before coming to De Montfort.

Sorry for the bad quality but I've never had an A3 scanner to use to upload these with. So well drawing has always been one of my strenghs yet I have never drawn landscapes at all up until now. As you can see I just concentrated on people animals and things. Then I got my first chance with perspective and landscapes with the Cannal project.

Things didn't start too well, I understood the vanishing point and horizon line and I think I've pretty much got 1 point perspective down but my final piece was quite disapointing. I had never drawn trees so I drew the basic shapes and shading and hoped for the best, as I really had no idea how to draw trees. Then I picked an angle where the vanishing point was hidden behind the bridge so it lost some sense of depth. I'm also still rellying heavily on HB pencils at this time as it was what I was told to use before this. Then came to the archway project.

So continuing with 1 point perspective but being unable to see the vanishing point. I didn't find this too difficult I preety much had it down on my first attempt only making a few errors here and there. I'm slightly happier with my final piece for this one as the trees although still fluffy at this stage at least have branches in areas. I'm still using HB pencils though so my shading is still lacking because of it. S the next Challange was 2 point perspective which really tripped me up.

I found this project very difficult it took me a long time before I got my head around it. Luckily I had a talk with Chris about how I was doing and he pointed out that I should start using graphite sticks and 6B and B pencils. So thats what I did though in most of my sketches I havn't attempted any shading as I was just trying to work out 2 point. I spent the whole of that sunday just drawing out the outline of my Final piece, whos building I regeret picking as its such a complex building, I'm sure I must have been a little crazy to pick it. It was around 3 weeks later that I actually got it finished working on it whenever I got time but I'm really happy with it now as the time I have spent on it seems to have paid off. I got to practice with shading, and look trees that actually look like trees! I watched a video tutorial online to how to draw them and thats helped me quite a lot. We then went on to work more on rendering techniques and I got to test out B pencils alot more.

This was a very enjoyable project, I got to experiment quite a bit and test how much more effective 5B shading techniques are. In my sketches you can see my experimentation the most, with the skulls being done with graphite sticks and B pencils whilst some of the lighter bone structures done with B and HB pencils. My final piece was a mixture of both, as the bones where light and contrast was difficult to find I wanted it to retain its smooth feel so I was slightly unwilling to rely too heavily on 6B pencils as the texture they can give sometimes I thought might have spoilt it. Unfortunately the result is that its still quite flat.
I'm making progress and learning perspective skills that I had never been taught before and my rendering is improving. I'll write another blog to show you how I continue to use these skills.

My Gaming History

 Well where to start ... I know my first birthday! Literally.... okay this may sound odd and I'm not sure if its real or not but I'm almost certain its a real memory. I remember staring at my family all stuck around the TV playing Micro Machine on the Sega. After that I remember crawling up the stairs to find my sister who was playing on some toys with my cousins and then attempting to get back down stairs at which point the memories stop as to what actually happend next... I fell down stairs. I definitely fell down stairs and the memories before that are quite clear to me but I can't be sure they are real because I was so young when that happened. But anyway I had videogames in my life even then.

 The three games along with Sonic that I remember fondly playing on the Sega

We all used to play on games like sonic the hedgehog and echo the dolphin, later when the Playstation 1 came out I used to watch my dad play Tomb Raider. I hardly ever played them at this age though, I just watched others play.

Three Games I remember watching my dad or family and friends play but never playing them myself, Lara Croft, Sonic and Medal of Honour once we got the PS2.

 
When I moved to Italy we had a few years with no console but then eventually got the PS2 and SSX and Shadow of Memories (which I only completed around 4 years ago).

Kaori was my favourite character to play as and still is in SSX. Poor shadow of memories its quite a good game its just ashame nobody at that time in my family was a good enough gamer to actually complete it.

My Aunt came to visit us and brought me Crash Bandicoot and Spyro: a gateway to Glimmer, these were my first video games I ever got to play to myself. Instead of playing on the latest games I had gone backwards and played on PS1 games.

 Such amazing graphics right?

From there I got my first Game Boy and Pokemon Yellow, and over the years the rest of the Pokemon games that followed, as Pokemon was cool back then. I also had a little game called "Ty the tasmanian tiger" (whos ten year anniversary it is this year) and SSX tricky.

 My Pikachu never liked me as I pretty much button smashed my way through that game without actually knowing what I was doing.

As I bought and completed all the original Spyros it was already time for me to move back to England. Thats when spyro also moved onto the Ps2 with "Spyro: enter the dragonfly". One very disappointing game but being the spyro fan I am played it obssessively. Then Spyro was taken over by Sierra where they made "Spyro: a heros tail" which was better but still couldn't compete with the originals.

I had quite a few years just playing Spyro and Ty the tasmanian tiger and nothing else. One Christmas in 2006 a lovely little advert popped up on screen for a game called Kingdom hearts 2.  This was my first big step away from Spyro and into the world of rpgs. After completing it and its predecesor, browsing through the PS2 games in Tesco proved fruitful as I found Final Fantasy 10. Id found out about final fantasy through Kingdom hearts and since they were the same company I decided to try it out. I was completely out of my depth at first but this very old game for 2007 introduced me to the world of role playing games. Lucky me didn't have to wait long for my next and newer taste of Final Fantasy as 12 came out that same year.

I think I've clocked around 140 hours on Final Fantasy 12. 

As I became a final fantasy fan I searched for what was next in store and thats where I discovered "The fabula Nova Cristallis" thingymajig. I then found one trailer that made the decision of whether or not to get a PS3 or Xbox 360 in the form of Final Fantasy versus 13 as its a PS3 exclusive I bought a PS3. Its being directed by my favourite artist Tetsuya Nomura and to this day I am still waiting for this game to be released.

With the purchase of my PS3 I have been opened up to many more games. Little Big Planet was my first PS3 game and soon followed by Assassins creed.With my love for rpgs I started playing Elders Scrolls, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Final Fantasy 13 and Disgaea. I've never been much of a pc gamer other than playing the original Sims at one point, this is due to not having a computer powerful enough to run games, but maybe after this Christmas I may be flung into the world of pc gaming so I'll be giving you an update on how that goes.