#personalshowcase

I decided to also design some business cards for printing as they're great for in person networking..

This is my favourite out of the two and here's the other one..

this is a WIP of the rough colour scheme..

Then i added shading and played around with the HUe/ saturation a couple of times but decided to go with the original..

Then I added more shading and highlights for added depth with a different brush..

This is the final version of it being sunny and the one below is the night version..

After working on the thumbnail designs I started sketching out some of the houses in some more detail while referring back to my Pinterest board and some images I put on the composition for reference.

These are some of the buildings from my thumbnails in a bit more detail and then I finalised my big background design...

I really didn't know where to start for this personal project so I just started looking for inspiration off Pinterest of things I like. I know I wanted to do a series of background designs for this project but since then I’ve changed it to making my own little town and coming up with concept sheets for the buildings and props.

I first made a mood board of reference images. New Orleans and the Bayous is a huge inspiration for this project, I love the design of the houses that are on the swamps so I collected a range of different images representing this...

I then started making some thumbnails of a small fishing town on the Bayou while referring back to the moodboard....

The biggest ones are the ones I’m going to develop further into the final background design, along side this piece I plan on having concept sheets for the buildings I’m designing and any other objects similar to how these drawings do...

Today I had my individual tutorial with Jon, the main focus was on the career development work and my personal showcase.

I honestly haven't even thought about that side of things just yet, I feel incredibly overwhelmed with just my FMP right now so all that on top as well is just allot. Talking things out with Jon helped to ease my mind a bit with regards to the personal showcase as thats another project on top of my FMP. Thinking about it I’m not going to animate anything for it but do some background designs and development instead as a little project as thats the side of the industry I’d like to get into anyways.

For the showcase I’m going to try and develop my technical background skills and that will be the main point of it, Jon sent some helpful links to artists that play around with this side of things such as...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbz1IT_Xizk

and also some screen skills links for the jobs side of the career plan. I’m going to look into job roles and what they require so I can try to build up those skills while doing my personal showcase.

Something I do enjoy doing is shoebox rooms so keeping with a similar theme I think I want to create a series of 2D dioramas that are linked somehow. And for inspiration based on these I can look into visual development artists as its similar to what I’d like to do.

https://www.artstation.com/search?sort_by=relevance&query=vis%20dev

https://www.screenskills.com/job-profiles/browse/animation/pre-production/background-designer/

Jon also showed my this 30 day art challenge thats happening in April which is a good idea for the showcase or to boost up my portfolio more..

https://www.warriorpainters.com/pleinairpril

For my personal showcase, I took a look at some of the areas where my portfolio was lacking in order to determine where I should focus my efforts. Looking at jobs I would be likely to apply for, it seemed that I should focus on character design and concept art, storytelling and graphic design for motion graphics. 

To cover these bases, I decided on three main projects:

Fairy Character Design Revamp

For this project, I will redesign all 8 of my current fairy characters, taking reference from current animation and implementing better storytelling into their designs. I’ve decided that I would like my cartoon to have more focus on history as this was something I enjoyed up until sixth form, so it seems right that costumes and character personalities should reflect the time period they’re from. I also think it would be cool for the story to involve some key moments in history, either re-enacted or referred to. 

Getting the colour for the nightmare scene was difficult more me. I wanted there to be a significant difference between the two scene types in my animation. And after a few tries of trying to distinguish the tones in this scene between the character and background, I found a happy place after iteration and feedback.

I couldn't figure out how too adjust the tones well, and with feedback, I found out the tone of the rock should be darker and or the same colour as the trash. And the character should be the lightest tone to stand out. 

[Test 1]

[Test 2]

I also decided to change the tone of colours to something cooler. 

During the beginning stages of designing my background, I lost the kind of look I was going for. I asked for feedback from my course mate based on the photo below, and they reminded me of my style frames and my initial look. That really helped me get back on track and put me on the right direction.

[Thumbnailing Colours & Composition] 

[Outlining and refining]

[Experimenting with Shadow and Light] - I got feedback from my friends on this and they asked what the light source was. I then realised that it looks like it’s from a flashlight. So I added a more curvy and wavy line to appear as a trees shadow, or light coming through a tree.