Multi-tasking is hard

We're now in the third week of our first five week project. We've been moving on well and getting a lot of work done even if there have been a few setbacks.

We realised that the FMP spec sheet had to be completed and signed and emailed to Mike Powell, so that ate up some of our time. However it gave us a great oppurtunity to adjust our brief.

We adjusted the brief so any 3d dioramas would be completed as stretch goals, this is due to both of us wanting to focus more on the 2d element of the project.

The hand in format is still in the form of a concept art book, minus the 3d dioramas as they are stretch goals for portfolio use.

Some of the technical specifications are:

• 60 character and creature concepts

• 12 environment concepts

• 2 dioramas: 15k tris

After the first five week project (Japanese folklore) we plan to have feedback sessions with the tutors to reflect on how it went and how to improve upon it. At that point we can then know how much work we can do in the amount of time and adjust the timeplan and workflow. This will then be repeated at each five week milestone as well as weekly feedback sessions with the tutors.

We decided to change the brief so we can focus on developing our art style instead of imitating others. We had started the project planning to present the final paintings in a traditional or specific style, however we had a chat with Craig and he suggested we use this time and project to develop our styles and show it in the form of a book. Georgia and I really liked that idea, and as for me I have always wanted to really find my style and work with it.

The final adjustment to the bried was the completion date, we decided to aim to have the book content finished and set off for printing by 6th May. That gives us a final three weeks for stretch goals, e.g working on our environment dioramas.

Other than all that admin work I did actually manage to get the firstand second iterations finished for the Tanuki character.

Tuesday was a way more productive day as I got the Tanuki character completely finished. I moved on to value studies arfter refining the initial sketches. I found value studies made it way easier to decide on a colour palette and have the character read well. I honestly have no idea why I didn't do them before now.

So colour palette work was a bit easier than normal thank to the value studies however I was also trying to match the colour scheme of this character to the main character, the little girl, which Georgia designed. I wanted to blend the colour palettes subtly as he is kind of a sidekick and a friend for the little girl as she goes on adventures.

After refining the colour palette for the Tanuki I finally did a final painting of this character and the little girl together to give them context in the world.

value studies

colour palette

tanuki final design

There was yet more admin and time consuming work on Wednesday. We decided to get to work on the second test print where we would test a bunch of different things to see how they would come out in the final print.

• Changing size to a large landscape 33x28 cm book

• Testing different transparencies for background images inspired by the Brave concept art book

• Testing layouts of images and text and the sizes of each

• Testing images continuing off the page

• A whole page with one image another with lots of small images

• Different background colours and fonts

Georgia is going to work on the second test print more as we keep in contact over the next few days.

Thursday we got some lovely feedback from Stas eventhough he was ill. He said to both of us that we have improved since the Style Matrix projects and our work has a more confident and developed style. He advised us to use the best of our work as a benchmark for the rest of the project. We took that onboard and got on with our character designs, I started on Teke Teke, an urban myth. This yokai is a girl that got cut in half by a train and if anyone crosses her she cuts them in half with her scyth so they are just like her.

From friday I started on sketching a number of my characters throughout the day. I chose to start doing that as I have to miss some days in the labs and hed to Wales for unrelated reasons. However I plan to sketch and use my Ipad to do studies and get a bunch of iterations done quickly over the days I'm gone. I've planned my time around this too.