Practice 3 - Final Submission
Honestly where does the time go? Two years part time, has just flown by. Never the less what started out with an aim to improve in certain aspects of design, has begun a journey of my capabilities in drawing and struggling with how to be able to describe how to draw as well as being able to maintain drawing.
I have not set out to prove drawing is easy, far from it. The '50 robots to draw and paint' book has a lot to answer for.. For giving me the initial idea of a starting point after changing my mind numerous times before this, to cursing at trying to draw a strong female robotic character.
I have discovered how huge the debate is regarding over exaggerated busts and flesh in female characters. Though there are plenty of strong female protagonists, it seems somewhat lacking still. From anime to movies and comic strips!
Though with a closer inspection, women aren't alone in this, the male counterparts seem to have an addiction to working out and have a six pack and rippling muscles showing the definition under their shirts.
I have drawn and drawn, and dare I say it again, drawn! Some good, some bad, and some I never want to even think of again. Planning could have been improved throughout the two years, but that's life.
I have learned (in no particular order)
- How important layers are when working on sketches, and that forgetting to work on particular layer is very dangerous, resulting in having to scrap it and start again.
- Ensure your page layout is the correct size from the very size to save masses amount of time scrapping and restarting the lot. Although this was beneficial for an overhaul on visual style of the book.
- I need to clear out my laptop I have sketches everywhere and some very large Photoshop files.
- Size 14 is slightly too big for a text font in a book.
- You shouldn't have to hide a females breasts from a character design as this defeats the purpose - acknowledging this is difficult.
- My shading is constantly improving along with drawing techniques and style, I can't seem to stick with one particular style, which I suppose is not always a negative thing. Yet something I would like to identify soon. I seem to flick through cartoon style drawing with block colouring to detailed pieces and not entirely sure which I prefer currently as it changes regularly.
- Getting feedback from friends, family and colleagues is very important in the design process, sometimes just bouncing off ideas initially to help you start is worth noting.
- Sometimes explaining how to draw the character can be difficult, trying to remember the tips you thought of at the time may benefit from a note pad to hand.
- Gauging how much work is enough and when to stop on one character, female droids are a very difficult concept still, after many a fails with these particular characters I concluded it just wasn't my forte.
- My design process and workflow was very jumbled initially, I would collect a range of images whether sourced or taken personally from a journey somewhere, get an idea from different parts, jot down some notes in sketchpad on my tablet, start thinking of colours and get carried away in the little designs and idea generation rather than getting sketches of the full character. Not to mention getting distracted by research.
- Learning to do different poses initially was a struggle, yet after plenty of practice it was something I particularly enjoyed yet could have presented more in the overall e-book.
- In-design is a great tool I have come to appreciate when Photoshop failed me numerous times, however I am still not able to figure out how to publish an .swf e-book from in-design to blogger which frustrated me for at least 5 hours of trying every different method. Even a beautiful laid out PDF format seemed too much for blogger to handle.
On a more positive note rather than a rant, I have learnt so much regarding art, characters and even reptiles and random animals, through sketching and studying them to find more information.
I have looked into topics such as seven elements of art and the character colour wheel, to which there are some amazing websites that you can focus on one particular colour and it recommends the rest depending on whether you choose primary, secondary, tertiary, complementary colours etc. I've experienced new software such as in-Design, Sketchbook (Which is now free after I bought it), even played around with Paint Tool SAI, even Blogger, I experimented with Maya for a brief period also, which was a shocked after using 3Ds Max for so long.
Above all it has been a great experience, coming from a partial design background with more focus on the software engineering aspect. I began this journey on the MA to prove to myself that I was capable of the design aspects. As a child I always though art was somewhere I would end up, paths changed and whilst I don't regret it, I am glad it led me back. I wanted to focus more of drawing and it was a long struggle, but I am happy with the overall results even though there's always room for improvements, I am very critical of my own work, which I think is slightly evident in the e-book produced, I tried to refrain and had to reword quite a bit of it.
Above all I will be continuing to draw more frequently. Especially with being in the habit of taking my tablet everywhere with me now, though I think Sketchbook is not for me anymore after working on Photoshop so much.
Above all I will be continuing to draw more frequently. Especially with being in the habit of taking my tablet everywhere with me now, though I think Sketchbook is not for me anymore after working on Photoshop so much.
It has given me a wider knowledge base on Games Design for the level threes at work, which I thoroughly enjoy teaching along with Photoshop in Imaging Software with level two students. Teaching them not only good practices but also sharing my mistakes along the way, so they understand the importance or practice makes perfect.
I do not consider myself to be a perfect character designer, in-fact I scrapped so many designs that I wish I had kept, but I have gained a vast amount of knowledge, gained some great contacts and I have improved immensely!
This project was to set out to draw strong female characters and I believe that is what has been created, based upon my personal definition.
When I initially started this research, I expected all my characters whether NPC's or not, to be large, bulky, masculine and with an artillery to scare even the bravest of warriors. However my perspective on strong female characters has changed slightly with the arduous amount of research into characters, stances. They can be all shapes and sizes (yes even the slightly bigger busted ones), yet what makes them strong in a viewing is, their clothes, their pose, the background story if they have one. It's one's initial thought on first seeing them, being able to relate to the character and by that I mean not being the perfect airbrushed human, with the minuscule sized waist, big breasts, perky ass and flawless skin.
One thing is for sure, it won't stop female or male characters being over sexualised, after all that is what sells. At least now when I draw characters I will think twice about drawing the big muscle bound hunk, that has the body of superman!
If I were to complete this again, I would definitely organise time a little better, I really would have liked to have added more background stories to the characters and included all the different poses I had completed. Along with getting the book printed!
I indeed would have blogged more images regarding my learning curves especially in colour and adding detail and perhaps created videos of my drawing. I am sure it's something I can do in the future, especially when I show the students the e-book as they haven't seen the finalised version yet.
When I initially started this research, I expected all my characters whether NPC's or not, to be large, bulky, masculine and with an artillery to scare even the bravest of warriors. However my perspective on strong female characters has changed slightly with the arduous amount of research into characters, stances. They can be all shapes and sizes (yes even the slightly bigger busted ones), yet what makes them strong in a viewing is, their clothes, their pose, the background story if they have one. It's one's initial thought on first seeing them, being able to relate to the character and by that I mean not being the perfect airbrushed human, with the minuscule sized waist, big breasts, perky ass and flawless skin.
One thing is for sure, it won't stop female or male characters being over sexualised, after all that is what sells. At least now when I draw characters I will think twice about drawing the big muscle bound hunk, that has the body of superman!
If I were to complete this again, I would definitely organise time a little better, I really would have liked to have added more background stories to the characters and included all the different poses I had completed. Along with getting the book printed!
I indeed would have blogged more images regarding my learning curves especially in colour and adding detail and perhaps created videos of my drawing. I am sure it's something I can do in the future, especially when I show the students the e-book as they haven't seen the finalised version yet.
