The Journey

Concept Art

Over the course of the time spent in education I've always had an affinity for creating worlds , designing characters and writing stories. Through studying a background of Fine Art and Graphic design and recognising my love for animation this began the journey in the animation industry. While from the start I had wanted to become a character concept artist, this led to other specialised areas, such as storyboarding and modeling.

While my earlier work had this background knowldge of art and drawing, I was required to learn a plethora of different styles, so took up the opportunities that gave me the chance to explore these. Originally this was the specialist topic I had wanted to go into with joining the 3D Computer Animation course while also wanting to be an animator, although learnt that there were many other areas that would I would be able to go into with this profession. 

While a lot of my early work had this background knowledge, it had heavily lacked the knowledge of what defines a great character silhouette and clothing designs, which ultimately resulted in these early designs being more experimental designs rather than something of a more professional nature. While this hadn't proved to be a problem, I began learning what makes a design visually sppealing from both the 12 principles of animation, and books written by the greats of animation, such as the nine old men and the illusion of life. Althought this book had been for the 12 principles of animation, there's a vast amount that promotes strong designs, considering appeal being one of these 12 principles. This had been one of the principles I wanted to gain a solid understanding of, and led to tightening my skills for drawing and designing further.

Through my experience in both education and the industry, i have continually pushed my skills to hope to keep improving and pushing my work to a higher quality. After concentrating and focusing on understanding the visual standpoints to what makes great design, I continue to improve my skills of character concept art, as although I have understood a few different styles, I plan to focus on projects that center around styles that I haven't tackled so much with my time in university. For example, while in college I had mastered the art of drawing the human body and it's anatomy, to currently understaning a cartoon style. Hopefully through summer 2018 I plan to work on projects that explore Matte painting in more depth as this seems to be my next main challenge in learning the techniques needed to produce an industry standard matte painting.

StoryBoarding

Storyboarding has always been an enjoyable process with having to express a moment in time between the characters present and the story of the scene. While originally I hadn't had a lot of experience in storyboarding prior to university other than small panels, the first of university hadn't taught the importance of storyboards and the detaild that is required of them until summer 2016.

Summer 2016 had been the time in which I had been given the opportunity to working as a character concept artists and later a also moved to becoming a storyborad artist. Although during this time, I didn't have a vast knowledge of storyboarding, this had quickly changed with the training and superiviosn i was given. While during this training I had been told multiple times to simplify my drawings, as I had been overcomplicating them and needed to learn other aspects before I could move onto more complicated storyboards. This started out with drawing very simplistic roughs to get an idea of where the character would be positioned and what action the characters were doing.

This project had shown me how to experiment with a range of camera angles and posing of the characters, something still to this day I promote is to push character poses as far as is humanly possible as this leads to visually compelling storytelling. The complexcity of the storyboards I had been creating had started out in reference to Moebius, Jean Giraud, whose original storyboards are extremely simple to firstly establish the scene before finalising the panels. While this process had taken slightly longer than I had anticipated, as I needed to get the technique down before progressing onto more detailed storyboards, it eventually showed through with my most recent storyboards as are seen on the storyboards page.

Although trying to learn this technique hadn't taken quite as long considering some books i have that told me visually how to set up a panel in a way that promoted the scene and shot, for example the Star Wars Storyboards book, both the original triology and the prequels. These promoted the use of strong silhouetted characters and to push these poses to have for a more dynamic shot. This greatly helped with the storyboards that were created for the UWTSD's INSPIRE project that are shown on the last page of the storyboards page.

Modeling

Originally when starting out in university I had fully intended to mainly tighten my skills for the quality in my draftmanship. While this started to slowly change over time due to working on university projects that required me to sculpt characters, I not only wanted to improve my draftmanship skills but also my modeling skills. This had been partly after being told to convert the knowledge i held from 2D into 3D, although the knowledge for proportions had previously been acquired for drawing, transferring that into 3D had originall proved difficult.

During the first year of university and with the introduction of modeling, specifically a human character, the assignment that had been given I hadn't known enough about the software skills required to fully utilise the skills from 2D to 3D. Although from this first encounter with 3D character sculpting, it had taken a while to fully get into 3D modeling this being partly due to slightly doubting in my ability, although after some reassurence from my peers and lecturers this had slowly started to go. During the time of summer 2016 was when I had been given the opportunity with working as a character concept artist and later led to becoming a storyboard artist. The team I had been working with had put emphasis on my skills for 2D and to begin transferring these skills into 3D, the confidence had taken a while to build up but with an assignment during the second year of university that required me to "break the ice" and fully embrace 3D. This assignment had helped break some of these confidence issues with instead of entering the task as something to be found daunghting, I started to find it rather enjoyable, and all that had been needed was the time to sit down and go through the tools of the software. 

While this second year project had been a large stepping stone in gaining a vast amount of 3D knowledge and allowed me the opportunity to explore different methods of sculpting to find what had worked for that particular project, it later helped with gaining that confidence and learning the knowledge to push the quality of my work. This had been especially the case with the Major Project, partly because of the final characters' design had been very adventerous and different. I had created those character designs, as is seen on the beginning of the Concept Art page, to push my boundaries and learn as much as I could within the time that was given. The concepts had all held a very "Disney" and cartoon style about them, partly because this is the style that I want to perfect over time and is the style that I want to mainly train in, considering the studios that I currently aim towards working for. While learning the process of sculpting and modeling I had looked towards 3D artists such as Danny Mac, who gives tutorials online to show his process and method of modeling. This greatly helped as a starting point that later led me to explore the software and sculpting for myself.

Although I had started out originally wanting to become a character concept artist this has slowly changed over time, while I still currently want to become a character concept artists, I also want to create concept sculpts and hopefully become a character sculptor, especially for the newfound enjoyment I have towards modeling. Currently for the summer of 2018, I have a vast amount planned for sculpting characters and wanting to use the final sculpts to have cast in bronze or a material that would make a statement piece. 3D modeling has become an enjoyable process especially with how it's sketching but only in 3D.