New Year. New Art. New Start.

New Year. New art. New Blog, so this is my final year studying Game art design at De Montfort University and as is traditional I have a new blog and as always a new enthusiasm for actually keeping up to date with it. I decided I would start it off with a quick overview of my summer and of my degree on the whole. (Warning Long post.)

A quick recap on my first year, I turned up to uni with some basic knowledge of 3D and even less so of 2D. I socialised a lot in my first term and “worked hard” in the second and third term to bolster my long neglected fundamental skills, something that is benefiting me every single day of my art life since. It was maybe not the best year but it got me on the road to where I am now, which is somewhat satisfying. (Time travelling back to first year always makes me cringe.)

Fast forward to second year. Second year was hard. Not just kind of difficult, like everything about it, mentally, physically, artistically. Looking back it was partially to do with how draining the course was but mostly I was not use to working that much. Group projects were challenging but helpful, work was tiring but I improved over every project. I learnt a lot about managing stress, burnout and fatigue during second year and I feel it has hardened me a bit more to the reality of working consistently and productively days a week. Below is some of my second year work, a major improvement on first year but still drastically below target.

(Group project Above.)

A couple months passed that and I am here, at the end of summer and the beginning of my third and last year of university. A daunting and slightly relieving notion, a weird sense of it’s almost over in both a positive and negative way. But I will save my state of my mind for third year for later. This post is about my summer.

At the beginning of summer I had great plans, go travelling, Draw every day, Do multiple projects, do everything I could to improve for the start of third year. I can safely say without a doubt, I completed none of these, not even close. This is something I am used to by this point, punching ambitiously above my weight. But like always my unreasonable ambition usually leads to something good, even if it is not close to what I originally had in mind.

Once I got home from uni I got to work setting up my new cramped, dark, hot work space in my small overcrowded room. It was actually kind of perfect. If I could work with this much mess and distraction. I could work anywhere. And so I did, I got right in and started on a character. After playing through the witcher 3 I really wanted to make a soldier in the style of the Novigrad guard.

After some rough concepting I got to work on my high poly, Part of a work flow I had been developing throughout the second year. Over the course of a month and a bit I created a full character from start to finish taking opportunity to learn new tools and techniques, something which I didn’t usually have the luxury of doing as much. I won’t go into details about the process as it was over 2 months ago and there was a lot of back and forth but I can safely say I am a better character artist as a result.

This successfully productive project in that small dark room in that 30 degree heat came at a cost. I was thoroughly burnt out by mid-july and had no more juice left to make another character let alone even start. I tried and tried and tried to absolutely no avail, and this is when I learnt something really interesting about burning out. For me at least. Just because I am too burnt out to make characters doesn’t mean I can’t do something else, like say draw environments. Something I have always struggled with, and you know what that was suddenly super fun by complete contrast to my usually work. When I got bored of that I would get a train up into central London and spend the day drawing sculptures at the Victoria and Albert Museum. That is really how I spent the rest of my summer, just chopping and changing between anything whenever I got bored or stuck. As long as it was creative, it was fine. Thus that was the first time I have effectively got close to side stepping burning out.

The last point of interest to my summer was the only thing which even came close to a holiday, my weekend at industry workshops. I went last year and was not disappointed in the slightest, art talks all day. Every day. Free coffee in the morning and free beer in the evening. Every day. And this year was no different. I saw some really inspirational talks from the some great artists, and on a range of areas from environments, to characters to industrial design. I also got a glimpse of what goes on at the London Atelier School or Representational art (LARA). I was really craving for some traditional art soon after, so when I got back to Leicester I did some studies, drawing’s and acrylic paintings with my flat mate. Which were all super refreshing after sitting in a small dark room, hunched over a tablet staring at the illuminating glow and allure of my tiny cintiq with jon Hopkins trippy electronic music blaring in the background.

So that was my summer. Tune in next for my first day of third year blog.

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