This week was all about focusing on shadows and lighting for our worlds!

For the first workshop we were asked to pick an object from our world and add tone and value to it. At this point my group hadn’t discussed much about what was going to be in our world so I just chose my object to be a TV.

We were then tasked to take one of our thumbnails drawn in the previous week and add more tone and value to it to create the mood and atmosphere we wanted that scene to portray. I chose to do our robot character in an unused and derelict under-ground train station. I really wanted to focus on the lack of lighting and kept it very dark and neutral in value but emphasised the light coming from the characters tv face and an eery light coming from a corridor up ahead. I wanted this scene to be eery and creepy.

For this weeks homework our group focused on creating a mood board for the colours and feel we wanted our world to have. I created my mood board with a big focus on the neon lights of Japan streets and the contrast of blues and pinks within the environment.

Andressa in our group created the mood boards below which we all agreed on it being the kind of colour palette we wanted for our world environment. I feel like the blue and purple colours used in this mood board give the environment the eery feel we wanted our world to have.

This weeks class was focusing on perspective. I have a little bit of experience with this but I do still struggle with getting proportions correct. I started with practising on one point perspective and drawing cube shapes.

This workshop was great for refreshing my memory with perspective, however I definitely felt a little rusty so will need to keep exploring avenues with different perspective points to get some practise!

I also spent time looking at different compositions from animations. Composition is very important in scenes for drawing the viewers attention to what you want them to see. There would be no point in having a character dramatic scene but the audience get lost in looking at an over technical or detailed background. That’s why composition is important to understand, wether it be the golden ratio or rule of three, it’s important to know when and how to use these!

For this weeks homework we had to draw 6 thumbnails of scene setting for our group world project. For these I really wanted to focus on perspective points and lighting. With our world as tv/sci-fi, I really focused on keeping the scenes based on city/apocalyptic settings. The scene tone is very dark as the group wanted a more spooky feel for the world. I tried to keep the thumbnails basic, but as someone who loves realism art I always find it difficult and end up going a bit overboard with details! However I’m happy with the end result and feel like I have managed to capture the vibe our group wanted but also show my understanding of perspectives and composition.

For week one we were tasked for homework to find references some of our favourite characters and look at the way they are composed.

For my first reference I chose Tengen from the Demon Slayer anime. His character build is very bulky and muscular, and when looking at his composition you can see that everything has a bit more “beef” to it. When looking at his composition I realised that his shoulder blades are actually very spherical in shape to show the definition of his upper body. His proportions are very in keeping with the standard human form as there isn’t any exaggerated bodily parts as even the muscular tone is very in keeping with human anatomy.

My second character I chose to look at was Wall-E. I adore the way his character design is, and upon studying his shape I realised that there is a lot more shapes that make his form! When you first glance at him you see a very boxy cube with arms, but when studying his shape I found that he’s made of more than just cubes and cuboids but also triangles and circles. I love how all these shapes are composed as they work well together to form his character.

And lastly I chose Jake from Adventure Time. The animation style of this show in general is one of my favourites due to its simplistic but fun design. Jakes form is basically a bean with arms and legs, his character design is so simple but it works very well and you can instantly tell when looking at him that he is a dog.

Doing this workshop allowed me to look at how some of my favourite characters where designed and pieced together, in a way that I hadn’t really taken notice of before. I feel like this has been and will be very useful in future when character creating and looking at how different shapes compose to make an appealing character design.

Who is in my group? 

For the first week we were put into groups of 5 to work together and take reference images off a list provided to us. I was placed in a group with Charlotte, Jack, Karl, and Tegan. Due to being off sick, I was unable to participate in the first group activity, which was to take photos of images we felt related to the prompt words provided to us in class. We were placed into our groups on discord channels and any images were submitted into that.  The group then went back to class and tried to think of 100 different themes for a world build.  

Something colourful!

A weird shape..

Something that looks cool.

A pet (My contribution whilst off sick!)

What final 5 ideas did we decide upon? 

My group decided on 4 different ideas, but we never confirmed a 5th. We created ourselves a separate discord channel and discussed what our art styles were and what theme we felt would suit our art styles best. We then decided to vote on what our preference theme would be. We decided to go with our second idea of a Tv head/Sci-fi world.