So basically this is going to be one of those very convoluted blog posts that I don't expect anyone will read, but if any of you want to know things about where I am currently, then this will provide all of the info necessary!
First of all, I'd like to say a very big Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone!
The reason I've not been posting as often is due to a laptop crisis of sorts...in that it likes to randomly bluescreen/crashdump whenever it feels like it, and has been officially declared null, void etc. by a computer man in a shop (who i paid quite a lot of money just to confirm that for me, ffs.) Basically if I even remotely try to open Photoshop, plug in hardware, or open more than about three tabs, it freaks out and bluescreens. Which has put a stopper to any digital creativity this Christmas!
The good news is that I'm currently researching new laptops, which will be fun and exciting as it has been four years since I bought myself any new gadgets!
The furthest I got before it died was an unfinished 4 hour digital painting which I will share with you briefly!:
I'm very glad I managed to recover it (thankyou autosave) as it all looked pretty grim for a bit. I'll hopefully be back in business soon!
As for the imminent future, the next big piece of news is that I have officially signed up for the Advanced 3D for VFX course at Escape Studios. Following on from the Taster course I wrote about a couple of months ago, I decided to bite the bullet and go ahead with it. The course is 18-weeks, very intensive but hopefully by the end of it I can officially call myself a 3D Artist which will be very exciting! More on that soon, fingers crossed!
Finally, I had a lovely quiet Christmas with my family, and received lots of lovely prezzies (mainly Game of Thrones themed) for which I feel very lucky that I have such generous family and friends! All of my gifts went down well too. I might post separately about this if I get the time :) I can't wait for New Years Eve, where I plan to get very very intoxicated before I have to start burying my head in education again.
Anyhoo, that's all from me, hopefully the next time I write will be from a brand new, fully functional laptop!
So I'm a little late to the party, but I thought I'd join in with a lovely idea created by the blogger geniuses that are BeingLittle and ThisLovelyLittleDay (whom I think you should go and check out immediately, if you don't already follow them). Put simply, we have to create something from a weekly prompt, which I think is a) clever and b) just what I need to get myself out of my art block! If you want to join in the fun, head over to Lyzi's post here!
This week's was GRATITUDE, or what we're thankful for.
Besides the obvious things like family, friends, health and the opportunities I've been offered throughout my life so far, I think one of the things I'm most greatful for is thehuman imagination. It sounds horribly cliche, but if you think about it, we wouldn't have anything if someone, one day, hadn't dreamt it up.
My take on this is obviously dragons, pirates and misty mountains (can you tell I'm looking forward to The Hobbit?) but I think it's brilliant what the human mind has created, especially in art, myth and storytelling. As I'm going to be entering into a field which specializes in bringing the impossible to life, it felt right to choose this for this week's prompt.
Anyway, as next week's theme is DREAMS, this image may encompass both, in which case I'll see if I can come up with something different.
Being a person who likes to spend a lot of money on live music (and then wonder why she doesn't have any), I try to think about which bands I spend money on. With festivals, it's different, you're going there for the experience, the people and the weird and wonderful fantasy land you get to camp in for four days, as well as you are the music. But with live concerts, I have to really like them.
So with Half Moon Run, I'd actually been on a Spotify binge (which I can't do anymore due to my subscription running out, sad times) and was putting together a new playlist to a) get ready for Latitude Festival and b) motivate me during the last push of my dissertation. I usually ignore the spam from Spotify telling me to 'check out these bands we think you'll like!' but this time I didn't. And I'm glad I did!
Half Moon Run are a four-piece hailing from Canada, and when I looked them up, Spotify only had one of their songs stored, 'Full Circle'. I knew nothing about them, listened to this track, and immediately added it to my thoughtfully-named playlist, 'SUMMER SONGS WOO'. I then stumbled across 'Call me in the afternoon' and the entire Dark Eyes album. As I used to sing (a bit, not well ha) I think the first thing that strikes me about any band is the voice. And Devon's voice is really interesting. They have harmonies reminiscent of Fleet Foxes and Fossil Collective, and a kind of keening/straining in his voice that drew me in. And they were playing at Latitude, ticking the last box.
Stupidly, though, I missed them at Latitude, and then found out that my brother liked them too, and had managed to miss them at Latitude AND Reading. But we liked them so much we took the plunge and bought tickets. As they've mainly been touring as a support act for bands like Of Monsters and Men and Mumford and Sons, the tickets weren't expensive, and as Connor informed us mid-gig, this was the biggest of their headlining gigs so far.
The support was a little-known artist called Mikhael Paskalev. I only had a look at him the night before the gig, and whilst musically him and his live band were fantastic, the songs didn't really do anything for me. Whilst the harmonies and build-ups were very impressive, it was difficult to find a central melody/ a memorable tune within them to really motivate me to listen again, as he seemed to be playing around with several different genres at once. He certainly looked the part, well, until he donned a weird cap halfway through, which I'm not sure matched the get up, but hey-ho, that's musicians for you. Still worth a listen, I think.
The band came on pretty demurely, there were no big 'bangs' or crescendos, and they led in with '21 Gun Salute', which is quite a slow starter. It surprised me and my brother, who were expecting them to begin with 'Call Me In the Afternoon' or 'Full Circle', one of their leading singles. This turned out to be a fantastic choice, as they used the songs later on in the evening to really churn up the crowd.
The rest of the album went pretty smoothly, having listened to all of it on repeat for the last few months, I'm ashamed to say I did mouth along as much as I could (despite occasionally doing that awkward thing where you know half of a sentence and have to mumble the rest so the other fans don't think you're an idiot.) The rest of the set was a classic up, then down, a new song, then the big two towards the end. I think the resounding thing I enjoyed about their performance was their obvious surprise at such a warm reaction. A favourite moment was when Devon raised the microphone during the chorus of Full Circle and genuinely grinned his face off as the entire venue sang it back to him - I think it's lovely whenever you're present for an artist realising the effect they've had on such a large number of people.
After that, I began to get a bit worried. My favourite track, hands down, is 'She Wants to Know'. I can't pinpoint what it is about the song that makes it stand out, but I think Devon's vocals are incredible, and it was the one I was looking forward to the most. They'd played right through the entire album, and as She Wants to Know seemed to be one of the lesser-plugged songs on the band's Youtube/Twitter, I didn't think it would be used in the encore. I'd expected it about halfway through. However, they actually finished the set with it. And I was just as surprised as the band as I realised that most of the people around me were yelling the chorus just as loudly as I was. All I can say is the fans have bloody good taste.
Their encore was pretty special too. Opting to scrap the microphones and take on a Pink Mountaintops cover, Lumineers-style, It was pretty adorable to watch all four of them crowd together and harmonise without all of the gear. If I sidestep the screaming girls ruining it for everyone else, it was a highlight. That and Conner's response to a bloke yelling 'CONNER I WANT YOUR BABIES' with a wink and a 'You and Me Later'. The final 'Blues' was a humble, yet satisfying finish. Here is a video of the acoustic performance:
This has been a very exciting week for me, as I've started to take the first steps in my plans for the future. I've always felt that though illustration and digital painting is my hobby, I'd love to take it to the next level, and turn it into a skill where I could finally work in the industry I spend days watching. So I'm (hopefully) embarking into the wild world of CGI and VFX. I love working in 2D, but creating something that moves and appears photorealistic would be incredible.
So I've been looking at a number of colleges, universities and institutions to find the best place for me to do this. One of the courses I became really excited about very quickly was an intensive vocational course at a London-based studio called Escape. I was recommended them by someone who'd trained there, and so I did some research and booked myself onto an open day.
It's not like your average university campus, it not being a university at all, but a specialist, private college where people of all ages go to gain the skills they need to get into the industry. It's run and taught by industry professionals, primarily. There isn't so much of a theoretical aspect, in that at University you'd need to go and do probably more than one year, and spend some of your time writing essays and independently researching. Now having done an English Degree, a vocational route appealed to me a lot more. I enjoyed my time at Uni and I would never take it back as it provided me with the skills I needed to get to the next stage in my life, and some of the best friends I've ever made. However, at this point I think I really just need training in the software, and that's exactly what Escape offers.
On Thursday, I went ahead and attended their Taster Session, which they offer as an introduction to the kind of training you'd be getting if you took one of their Courses, which I think was a brilliant offer, in that it helped me work out what I was getting into before I nose-dived and signed on. I met some interesting people, and got to try out a day working in 3D with Maya, one of the leading pieces of animation software. I'm not going to lie, it's incredibly daunting, there's about a million different tabs, options and tools, as well as several different methods of achieving the same goal. We were taken through the entire process, Modelling, Texturing, Camera Tracking and even a bit of Comp at the end. We all had huge, good-looking computers to work on, and a screen to watch the tutor on as he explained how to go about doing things.
The end goal was to create some cubes in the style of Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes in the 60s, something a little like this:
We then had to use pre-made textures and bump maps to create two boxes with a cardboard and a metal texture. I think this was useful because it showed the variety you can achieve. I think texturing is definitely going to be my favourite part of the process, as creating the 'surface' of the object in Photoshop is part of the process. I also enjoyed creating the camera angles, as I could watch the camera pan around so I could check the angles, and it suddenly became an animation rather than a screenshot.
Anyway, here are some snapshots of the end product:
Despite it being a taster course, it was a fantastic experience and I was really pleased with the end product achieved in only a day's work! The tutor was very clear throughout the tutorial, and the people I met were lovely. Despite being one of the only absolute beginners in the class, I certainly didn't feel excluded. I learnt a lot more about the process, and if anything it made me even more excited to get started.
However, as a disclaimer I'm not 100% decided on whether Escape is the right option for me quite yet, I'm still in the process of visiting a few different places in order to get a rounded view of my options and make a calculated decision before I take the plunge.
I'm going to keep this blog updated, and I'll let you all know what I decide to do. I recommend the Escape taster session for anyone that wants a sneak peek, as it was great fun and very informative.
So it turns out I, like many people, experience sudden bursts of creativity that generally amount to nothing productive.
I'm really good at starting things. I start a lot of things. But very few of them ever get finished, or finished to a degree where I feel genuinely proud of them or worth posting.
This may well be some kind of perfectionist complex, and so this is my attempt to force myself out of it.
This was a painting started predominantly because I really wanted an iced tea. As you can see, it is the least finished, probably because I bought an iced tea the next day and never looked back.
This character is something I'm really hoping to finish soon. I'm proud of it and I think my painting is improving, slowly and surely. Her legs are proving to be the most irritating limbs I've ever drawn, partially because I like the rest of the image so much I'm constantly redesigning them to match.
Think I'll sleep on it for now.
This is another sketch I've grown to like recently. I posted my progress on instagram yesterday and actually got a cheeky repost, which I was very chuffed by considering the image quality on my phone camera. It's Edward Kenway from Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, which though I haven't played it yet, I am planning on buying it soon and have been watching Hannah from the Yogscast play it through. Above all it's a gorgeous game, just like the others, and I love how big and detailed the map is. I'll update if I can actually get my hands on it! In the meantime I might scan him in and make him into a piece of digital painting at some point. But for now, he can stay a manly rugged sketch.
I think I might make more of these more often, if anything just to prove that I do draw on a regular basis. I'm also snowed under with creative projects, as well as my job so it's difficult to keep on top of everything. I'm determined to keep blogging, if anything to fuel my own motivation.
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