Alright, so the whole “One Post Per Week Minimum” thing kinda crapped out there for a few months. I’m hoping I’ll be able to get back into the swing of that though. I actually had a productive night after one of my long work days, so that’s an improvement too.
And, as the title of this post implies, I’m trying something new. It’s no secret I’ve had a bit of a problem keeping myself interested in the last couple… everything… I’ve started lately. What may actually be a bit of a secret though, is what I’m thinking might be part of the cause for that:
The Game Art program at Ringling, at least when I was there, was heavily focused on creating Environment Artists as a complement to their character-focused animation major. Had I been more canny in college, I might have noticed this disparity, noticed the way my interests leaned more towards creatures and characters than towards environments. I might have noticed that, left to my own devices, environments are not the things that I wanted to fill my sketchbook with. Had I been more canny, I might have done something with this knowledge.
Of course, I wouldn’t be where I am if I were more canny in college, so I kept plodding along, trying to force myself to like environments enough put the time and effort into being able to create professional environments rather than figuring out how to add what I wanted to learn to what we were “supposed to be” learning. But now, going on three years out of college and without having added more than one new piece to my portfolio, I’m starting to think that “not working hard enough” isn’t the only thing I’ve been doing wrong.
To that end, I’m going to take a stab at changing paths, and if I’m wrong, well, hopefully the “At Least One Post a Week” thing will stick better this time so that all the business about probably not being destined to be an environment artist gets buried by the time I come crawling back to environment art.
I’ve started attending Open Figure studios at our local art college. This is something I’ve missed. Just drawing from observation feels so good, even when you’re insanely rusty because it’s been over 3 years since you’ve done it…
And I recently found the needlessly well-hidden free membership option at 3d.sk (seriously, you have to be on the verge of trying to see if anyone’s uploaded their stuff to thepiratebay before they’re like “Wait! Wait! We’ve actually got a free account you can use!”) to start getting image planes and figuring out how to model and sculpt the human form.
Start of a base mesh after a couple hours tonight. I was working from this tutorial to hopefully get something approximating good topology, though, I’m a little surprised at how many N-gons are just sort of left in a very highly regarded tutorial. Will have to figure out how to clean those up before moving on…