Daily Art: My Next Top Model

January 12th:

The design for the next 3D model that I would like to make: an artsy grad student that could easily fit into my 3D gallery scene. I envision her style a little like the female character in the Disney short "Paperman", but with a somewhat more relaxed, artsy vibe.

Daily Art: Changes to my Changes

January 10th:

Sorry about the blurry photo; it didn't look this horrible on the screen of my smart phone. Blurriness aside, however, the point of this day's Daily Art was to lighten up some of the colors that I added two days prior; the top half of the image was just too dark. Now it's too light. Oh well: more work for the future!

Daily Art: More Tweaks to Existing Pages

January 9th:

This page, page 20, also existed before this day, but I made a few tweaks to it. Most of my tweaks involved the use of an opaque white marker to either lighten areas or cover up unwanted details that came through from the reverse page and muddled the already busy patterns that existed on this page. I basically just added some extra, much needed, contrast.

Daily Art: I Finally Finished This Page!

January 7th:

I finally finished this page of my Cut-Up Sketchbook. I've explained about my Cut-Up Sketchbook project before, right? Well, for anyone that doesn't know, my Cut-Up Sketchbook is a book that I bound myself using a combination of white drawing paper and sheets made of collages of handmade papers (for the record I made the collage sheets, not the handmade papers themselves). I have since proceeded to draw and paint in this book, as well as cut out pieces from it. In this book I use an x-acto knife as a drawing tool, letting the pages before and after each page influence the one on which I am currently focusing. I love this project. I think that this is some of the most honest artwork I've ever done: it comes straight from my soul. My greatest hope is that someday I can figure out how to incorporate this style into my more "professional" work, but for now I'll just keep creating my Cut-Up Sketchbook.

Daily Art: Feel like you're playing a game of "Spot the Difference" yet?

January 5th:

Ok, okay. So I know days 1-5 this year have not seen a whole lot of progress and these first five days of "Daily Art" must feel like a game of "Spot the Difference", but some progress is better than no progress. I wouldn't have had any artistic progress yet this year if I hadn't committed myself to making "Daily Art" again, so I'm going to go ahead and count this agonizingly slow progress as a personal win anyway. :)

Daily Art 2015

I've decided to bring back daily art: it's helpful to keep me motivated and moving forward with my portfolio. I continue to be creative and make new art when I'm not doing Daily Art, but I'm not entirely happy with the pace of my progress, and I certainly don't post portfolio updates nearly as often as I should. So, here it goes:

Daily Art 2015!

January 1st:

Chalk is also fun.

My sister asked me to help decorate a blank chalkboard for my 6 year old nephew's space alien-themed birthday party; this is what I came up with:

Daily Art: Cut-Outs and Character Sheets

Day 104:

Ok, so it's not really a character sheet yet, but I began sketching to create one. Unfortunately the sketching was slow because I was doing a bit of a redesign during it, but I feel like I'm going in the right direction. The subject of my character sheet will be the Mother Nature character that I posted on this blog in earlier Daily Art entries. I decided to change the "cloak" to something detachable. It's now connected to a bunch of birds that land on Mother Nature when she wants to wear it and fly away when she doesn't.

The bottom two images were sketched when I was considering that the character may be able to transform according to her environment, reflecting the flora and fauna of the location. I realize that there's not much to them, but they were just a couple of sketches while I was brainstorming...

 

Day 103:

I cut out some pieces of my cut-up sketchbook. They are difficult to see in this image without knowing where to look, but they're there:

Daily Art: Three Weeks of Daily Art

I've been working on the most recent pages of my Cut-Up Sketchbook for the past few days while I've been out of town:

Day 98:

 

Day 97:

 

Day 96:

 

Day 95:

 

Then I spent this past weekend with my niece and nephew helping my sister prepare for my niece's birthday party, so the art on those days is all party and kid-related:

Day 94:

On Sunday I acted as the unofficial photographer of the birthday party. I won't post pictures of the kids online, but I will show a snippet of an action shot of the piñata smash:

 

Day 93:

Saturday was cupcake decorating day:

The crab was following a design that my sister found (on Pinterest, I'm sure...)

 

Day 92:

On Friday I drew some pictures of "Frozen" characters for my niece and nephew that they chose to fold into fans. My nephew wanted Olaf and Sven, which he then colored before adding drawings of his own of Anna and Cristophe:

And my niece wanted Elsa, which I colored for her:

 

Day 91:

And before that was more Cut-Up Sketchbook:

 

Day 90:

 

Day 89:

On day 89 I spent the better part of my work time taking screen shots, editing, and compositing progress photos for this blog. I think this qualifies as Daily Art considering the amount of time that I spent working in Photoshop, but it does not yield its own images. You'll just have to look at days 76-88 to see the results of day 89's work...

 

Day 88:

A tree:

In the form of a photo collage.

 

Day 87:

I made a list of all of the remaining tasks to complete in the revision of my Juggler's textures this day.

And then I decorated it:

 

Day 86:

The 86th day of Daily Art was a Saturday on which I spent 5 hours face painting. Here's a sample of my work:

 

Day 85:

I also face painted on Friday:

 

And made a quick sign advertising the face painting:

 

Day 84:

On this Thursday and the two days before I spent time creating a 10 second long demo reel for my former school's Spring Show. As a student who was enrolled in the fall I still qualify for entrance into this year's show despite the fact that I've already graduated. This is the reel that I submitted:

 

Day 83:

I submitted that reel because I realized that the submission guidelines prohibited having any contact information anywhere other than the first frame of the 10 second time span (I edited out that frame for posting on the internet). This is the reel that I created the first time around (and the way that I would have left it had I had free reign).

 

Day 82:

This was the day that I began the reel-editing process.

And the day that I discovered that the resolution requirements were full 1920 x 1080 HD and that I had to re-render a couple of my turntables.

(such as the Juggler wireframe turntable that includes the image above.)

 

Day 81:

I spent this day trying to turn detail that I'd previously achieved through a normal map into detail achieved through a displacement map.

It worked in general, but lacked much of the sharp definition provided by the normal maps...

 

Day 80:

Daily Art day #80 was filled with technical behind-the-scenes stuff that provides no great imagery, like transferring sculpting from one object to another to utilize the UVs of the new item rather than the original one...

 

Day 79:

On this day I concocted some designs for face painting:

 

Day 78:

I reorganized my Juggler's UVs this day so that each individual piece of her won't require its own unique map when I texture paint her. I probably ended up averaging 3 - 5 items per map instead:

 

Day 77:

On this day I finished UVing every single piece on my Juggler so that I could really texture paint her rather than relying on procedurals as I did previously:

And, before that, I built a new mesh for the tire in my Juggler's shoulder:

It has far fewer polygons than the tire with the modeled tread, but I think that I should be able to create the same look of a tread by creating a displacement map with the tread pattern in it.

 

Day 76:

And, finally, on the first/last day (depending on how you look at it) of Daily Art for this entry, I created a new, solid mesh to replace the very high-poly wire mesh in my Juggler's tea ball.

Then I created and tested displacement and transparency maps to use on the new mesh to make it look like it's built from the same wires as the original mesh:

 

That's all folks!