Halloween - Art bots

Allowing myself the pleasure to wander aimlessly and post pone criticism, during the halloween

Halloween character design!

Since I have a mentored class coming up soon, I decided to hold on unmentored training that I'm taking online. 

As such, I'm practicing more ZBrush stuff from my last class in the meantime.

On this I allowed myself the privilege to wander aimlessly, but I had a purpose and story on my mind from the start. I'm mostly exploring adjacencies. There's a lot of question marks on this, somedays I hated it, some days I loved it. Mostly because it's a joke of a pikachu dressed robber, heavily inspired by some news I read about heisters who take funny masks to do their job, like spongebob's, mickey mouse, etc... as well as Die Antwoord's short film. I ended up censoring the pikachu features and adding a shout to halloween season.

I'm not sure if this is good enough to go to portfolio in the end, but I try to remind myself to forget about good, and have growth instead, which is not necessarily good, just an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to the research and work. But I rather have real growth than really good work, when I'm experimenting with personal work anyway.

WIP Bot

A WIP of a secondary project I'm running on the background
I'm trying to get multiple things running at once.

Character sketches

Some sketching done for a new class. 
I'm exploring a little of urban sided futurism, I admit a bit of a Tarantino vibe in some of these. (Which I am thankful for my family to feeding me his movies while I was a 10y old kid)
I'm not as inspired in this course, as I already had a tackle at lesson 2's homework and got my ass handed to me, even though I already did client work and personal work with some success, resembling the same exercise asked, it still came out unsuccessful. At least I did the homework, it just didn't come out that good mostly because I'm always over-ambitious and I want to get different kind of work in my portfolio than what everyone else does for the class...




But some friends are kinda nudging me to take an old sketch of mine for class:

Last test frame

I notice now that the background pack of photos I purchased and the teacher used is very good and well shot, but it limited me somewhat to the compositions I could produce, a new thing to improve on my work is to just look beyond what I can use as background and not stick to just the material the teacher is using.
I don't hate it though.

Reloading

Hey all. I hope I don’t bore anyone to death with my extensive ‘development notes’, they just help me to nail what went good and bad.

As planned, I’ve been trying to finish my course at Learnsquared, here’s another piece, routing towards a more cinematic approach and a less product-like 360 turn around shot, like the other one I posted. It’s tricky to pull off this 1 point perspective, because it’s something I do not like to have in a composition, unless the storytelling is some sort of foreign concept to the viewer. I think I’ve settled to present a shot like this and shrug it off, because I’m imagining a pursuit of the mech to someone, and then have her pause in time to reload and use her wits for the next move... or that’s the way I like to think, to get away with the 1 point perspective and mold it into a fitting theme! It’s also tricky because the image can get flat pretty quickly.

I experimented a lot with curves adjustments in photoshop, which I never liked to use much, as they quickly get out of hand. I’m more of a guy to use levels instead... but you know, homework is about experimentation, breaking barriers, and I think I was surprised at the end with the result, since I was skeptical that curves would work to balance values just as good as levels. I got out of my comfort zone, and that alone is great, regardless the quality of the end result.

Subcultures / Cyberpunk medic design

Hey ya'll. I really meant to post this online early, like, waaaay early, but life has been chaotic. I switched studios in the start of August and it was very complicated to adapt to a new pipeline, at least in the first few weeks, but I got the ball rolling, and I hope that nothing can stop it now!

I didn't stop thinking and using the techniques I learned at Learnsquared and employ them in my client work as well, it worked flawlessly,  even though I didn't finish this homework, (no time!) I found an immense value in employing these techniques for prototyping concept art, I don't know how many concepts I've done so far using Alex Figini's techniques, but it was a blast. Both the art director and me are happy with the results, so I'll keep on using them for a while, build on top, hybrid the process, and until I research on something else.

About the concept, I'll produce a few more later, I hope! Not sure when, but I'm excited to finish this course and pick a new one! I had so much trouble with setting the environment settings right, it was insane, but after countless renders of smaller concepts for work, I got the hang of material graph and other keyshot settings, came back to this homework and re-rendered everything.. so many render nights gone to the trash can! Practice makes perfect, I guess!

Overall I'm experiencing a bit of introducing subcultures and other life experiences I had to my work. Dreadlocks was a mark in my teenage years, so here's to those.

There are still issues with it, issues that I wouldn't have done if I was going to start over again or went back in time, but I love my experiments, as I would an ugly child. The wrong answer is the right answer in a different context, and I feel this in this work.