Quick 3d art dump

Been doing a tiny bit of 3d, I have been doing some sketching too but I'll scan at the start of next week.

This isn't a complete model, just me mucking about. I decided to model a room design from the Ikea Ideas page

More specifically, this one:

Photo of Ikea ideas room. 

I wanted to pick something that I could just focus on modelling, I'm trying to focus on developing my speed and efficiency whilst modelling, as usually I am... slow and inefficient. Heheheh.

I seem to learn a lot faster when I put a little pressure on myself and put out a large quantity of work, so I'm hoping that churning out a vast amount of 3d models will help my process.

This was actually one of the pieces of advice that was mentioned in the Steal Like An Artist book; to improve the quality of ones art, they must produce a massive amount of it.

However, this won't be aimless practise, I am particularly focusing on improving my modelling currently and searching out for new techniques.

Anyway, enough rambling, here is the rubbish model I made in an evening.

Quick mental ray render, I'll probably present these in unreal engine instead from this point. It's just a bit more difficult to make the lighting look nice without doing spending ages tweaking lightmaps.

I would finish it tonight but I've been the victim of a wheezing cough all day so all I want to do now is nap.

More stuff in the week. :)

-James

Ending a large project

I have been working on a large project called Phaneron since last february (ish), this project was the final major project on the Master's Degree I completed, a complex puzzle game with a lot of moving parts.

Development has stalled since before Christmas, and after doing a bit of talking with Amber and Dom we have decided to stop continuing the project.

A lot has been going on in the past few months or so: I have been dealing with a new job, had some personal issues to sort and I have been trying to sort out another place to live. The other guys also have their own thing going on which has meant it has been hard to plan a larger project around everybody's time.

Phaneron - Development Screenshot

Additionally, I was feeling like after a while that working on the game became a bit of a chore for myself, I was struggling to design the game in a way I liked. I didn't want to continue working on a project that in which my heart and soul wasn't in it 100%, this needs to be the case for these indie projects, otherwise they won't have the amount of effort put into it that they need to be successful.

So instead I am going to be focusing on myself for the foreseeable future. Focusing on my job, moving out, setting up a proper workstation, developing the Youtube channel and working on my own skills so I can develop an IP. Then I should be able to build larger more complex things with more confidence if I want to. With all of this in place then I should be free to go on to bigger and better things.

I have written up a more extensive of everything about the project in my blog post on the I_DO_TRI development blog, if you wish to take a look: http://idotrigames.wixsite.com/blog/single-post/2018/02/13/Development-Ceased-on-Phaneron-

Phaneron Development Screenshot

My Portfolio

Since I am going to be focusing on my own work more I thought it might be a good idea to redo my portfolio website. I was gradually hating the old site more and more because it looked a bit dated. The new design is more minimal and sets me up more for expansion later down the road when I produce more work. I personally think the design is a lot better in it's current version, it's just so simple and clean.

Expect a lot more work uploaded on here soon, my output has increased a lot in the last month, and I have some plans for personal projects which I will share later in the week. :)

The new website is made on Portfolio Box, which you can get here: 

https://jamesbroderick.portfoliobox.net/

Portfolio Website Screen

Life Drawing Art Dump! Week 2 - Biro doodles.

This is little art dump containing all the sketches I did in week 2 of my life drawing classes at the Bristol Figure Drawing Group. In this session I wanted to get into some serious practise, to hone my skills. 

One thing I think is lacking in my work is confidence in my lines, I notice I tend to chicken step a lot which can lead to broken up drawings. 

I also want to improve the overall accuracy of my drawings. This means getting the anatomy and general form correct, which is in turn done by looking and observing the model more, and checking the spacial relationships between different parts of the body to make sure everything is in the right place.

I stuck to a very simple medium for the whole session, just so I can focus on the one skill of improving my line quality. It was actually rather nice using the biro, I normally hate using them but I actually had a lot of fun using it. It feels like I could get the 'sketchiness' that one might bet if they use a pencil, but with that added permanent effect which forces me to try and not make mistakes!

Anyway, here are all the images below. It started from slightly longer pose times (15 minutes) before going onto quicker poses (5 minutes) before getting slightly longer again. (10 minutes)

Also, in other news, I'm getting a new pair of glasses Monday to flourish everywhere, which means NO MORE DAMN HEADACHES! 

Seriously, any and all screens have been giving my massive headaches ever since I have stopped wearing my glasses. 

For clarity: My backpack was stolen last September whilst I was staying at my girlfriend's house in Nottingham, a guy actually broke in the house around 8 in the morning! Lost my passport and a hard drive with a lot of data, the glasses were included in the loot. Basically, if you see a guy in Nottingham use a laptop with a portable hard-drive in a black cushioned case plugged into it, who doesn't have any issues looking at his laptop screen to see his large collection of Gumroad game-art tutorials because of his fine as fuuuuck glasses, then could you get in touch with me? Would appreciate. ;)

So yeah, I'm happy to get another pair, it has been causing me a lot of pain over the last two weeks with all the student marking I am doing. White excel documents are my Kryptonite at the moment.

More life drawings will be on here after Thursday the 22nd as next week is half term and the classes aren't running. Although I may do my own stuff in the meantime. :)

-James

I created a subreddit for sharing artist blogs! /r/artistblogs

A bit of a quick one. I was looking through Reddit for places to share art blogs (so I can show this place off) and I was a little bit disappointed to find that there isn't much in the way of a place where people can share their art blogs or where people can share other blogs they find interesting/cool.

There is an artblog subreddit but it's private and I thought that was weird and goes against the point of seeing all of the shared blogs, so I created my own alternative subreddit!

Subscribe and contribute to /r/artistblogs !

It's still a WIP, I need to add a proper rule system and other little reddit-y things, but as a basis this works quite well. 

If you are a painter, sculptor, game designer, photographer, film-maker, architect, graphic designer or you are involved in any other creative profession, then upload your blog onto here and we can exchange critique, feedback and nice comments about all the cool stuff we make. :D

-James

Art Dump! Return to Bristol Life Drawing!

Hey. I didn't realize it's been just over 2 weeks since I've updated the blog, I have been a little busy marking student work recently so I haven't had a lot of time available.

This is just a quick update showing some things I have been up to. In my last post I mentioned that I want to improve my art skills, so that is what I have been working on!

I have been pretty hardcore in trying to force myself to do practise, so I have signed back up to my old life drawing classes that I attended before the start of uni. Bristol Figure Drawing Group takes place at the Bristol Grammar School on Thursdays, and it's packed full of artists! When I last attended around 4 years ago we were in a smaller venue and there was only about 20 people and a couple of models. In my first session this time there must have been upwards of 80 people all doodling away!

A sample of some old life drawings I created at this class before I went off to uni.

This class was great for me before as I used it to learn my way around the basics and get a good amount of practise in to ease me into a routine of creating a lot of art. (Without doing the class before uni I would have sucked even more than I did.) Attending the class this time was a really nice experience, I got to meet my old art instructor again Will Stevens and I even got some nice feedback about my work, just like I did all those years ago!

It's creatively refreshing to return to a class which has helped me in the past, as the positive association is already there from when I attended before uni, now I can use it prove how much I have learnt in the past 4 years or so.

Another sample of old, rubbish life drawings. I wasn't very good at proportion back then.

New Life Drawing

I have been for two weeks now and have produced a range of work in different mediums. 

The first session I saw as a bit of warmup to get me back into things, so I just did what I thought felt best as opposed to actively picking techniques to practise with. I started off with something comfortable that I was using a lot of at the time: The Promarkers. These were great for just warming up with some value-based sketching.

I did a sketch using a 7b pencil I found at the bottom of my pencil case and sharpened it all nice using my craft knife so I had a wide tip.

Then I wanted to do something a bit more experimental, so I decided to dive into my little art box and found a little pot of black ink. I had some old brushes on me so I had some fun, they weren't the most accurate of sketches but it's nice to do something a little bit out of my comfort zone.

Ink drawings, I didn't like these as much as some of the proportions are truly fucked, it was nice being able to try something different though. I will come back to inks at some point.

During this first session I realised how out of practise I actually am. Proportions and anatomy just sort of blipped out of my head and it resulted in some drawings that are a little out of whack, also my confidence has went down a little as evident by some of the chicken stepping with my lines. This is one key area I want to focus on; improving the quality of my mark making as well as making sure the accuracy of my drawings are on point.

OH. And colour, I would very much love to get a lot better at painting in colour, this would free me up to design stuff better when it comes to concepting 3d scenes. (Another longer term goal that stems from improving my art skill.)

I will cover next sessions life drawings in another post. Just so I can section it up more neatly and give an excuse to add more to my post count. ;)

Sorry about the image quality, it's unfortunately the best I can do at the moment with my little iPhone cam and lack of good quality lighting (or lack of a scanner) I will try to remedy this when I get my new place. :)

Next time people.
-James

ADD IMAGES OF LIFE DRAWING - OLD AND NEW IMAGES-TAKEN IN DINING ROOM