September 25-26 Character Creation

I made dis...in Photoshop Elements 9.

Awwww yissss. Muthafuckin' fur gauchos.

They're main reason I'm not allowed to dress a man.

Also, I abuse the gradient tool. How many times did I use it?
Check the bottom of the post to find out!

Here are my ref pictures:

The female is based on an Antelope.

Image found on: http://eofdreams.com/photo/antelope/01/

The male is based on a ram.

Image found on: http://www.wallpaperpimper.com/wallpaper/download.asp?wallpaper=Ram_Animal&size=1152x864&id=146310

I also had to use a photo reference for the male because I couldn't get the anatomy right. 

I haven't really figured out any back story for these characters except that they are not adventurers or warriors. They're just regular townspeople of whatever jacked-up anthro-ungulate inhabited world they're from. I did take inspiration from ancient Grecian dance festival to use horns. The ancient Greeks had two types of dances for Dionysus; the women participated in a type of trance/ecstatic dance called Mynad, where they frolicked and danced (often drunk) in a forest wearing animal skins and antlers. The males had a dance too (dithyramb) but I didn't take any inspiration from that.

So that's that. I'm slightly proud of them and yet slightly embarrassed because they remind me of the new human-pony version of My Little Pony.

I used the gradient tool 9 times.

What I Do As An Artist & What I Want To Do In The Future

This is a report of what I do as an artist and what I want to do as an artist later in life.

I feel like I need to start from the beginning. I've been drawing characters since I can remember. They weren't actually mine--I drew characters from the video games I had grown up with, like Legend of Dragoon, Final Fantasy 8, and Okage. Those weren't the only ones, but those were the main three on my mind. I wish I had some of those pictures, because for a little kid I wasn't that bad at drawing.

In any case, I grew up with this and continued to draw characters mainly for online role-playing (yes, I was that kid), and ended up with two characters I would routinely come back to. These were bad-ass female characters my friend Misse and I had created: Neki and Reni. I drew those two over and over again with different outfits. Here is the most recent drawing from 2010:

If you must know, Misse and I were extreme Kingdom Hearts fans. These were our fan-made characters. Neki and Reni are the two blondes on the left. It's a little hard to explain the other two without explaining all of Kingdom Hearts, so let's just say that Neki and Reni are very, very acquainted with Kixen and Xinre.

And to clear the air, we're still fans, but not quite as intensely as we were back then. We were borderline weaboo.

Even though this most recent character drawing is from 2010, it was out of the blue. I really stopped character creation in 2008 when I was 13-14. I then focused primarily on female fashion creation.

2011

2012

I apologize for the poor photo quality.

Besides fashion, between 2009-2012 I developed my skills as a fine artist.

Senior Art Booth 2012

I won 1st place and a $1000 scholarship.

The girl who got 2nd was pissed and wouldn't talk to me.

It was funny.

Watercolor Landscape

Oil Painting

Since entering college, I've increased my drawing skills.

Me Posing with my White Charcoal on Black Paper Still Life

I also worked a little concept art for the 2013 Project Runaway competition.

My team ended up winning the Cultural Commentary category.

Ooh la la I'm a model

I'm not sure if it counts, but I am also a cosplayer. I used to sew my entire outfits, but now I focus on making the props for my friends and I. I love prop-making--there's something extremely cathartic about it. Here are some of my best costumes (no one will ever see my first abysmal attempts at cosplay in 2008-2010).

FFX Rikku sewn by me in 2011

FFXIII Fang and Lightning 2013

Fang is and was sewn entirely by my best friend Perla Vivanco.

I am Lightning. I bought the costume, but modified it and fitted it.

I created both my sword (not visible) and Perla's spear.

I'm sort of a Final Fantasy junkie

That's what kind of artist I am. Now, here is the artist I want to be:

I want to expand my abilities beyond female fashion creation. I want to work on making my own landscapes, interiors, fully fleshed out characters, monsters & creatures, and mecha. I do not want to be that quintessential girl who draws only female fashions.

I also want to become more acquainted with digital drawing and painting, and become proficient in 3D computer modeling.

At the end, I want to be a video game concept artist who can do all types of designs. I want to be a step above the rest, and I know I am no where near there yet.

So that is the artist I am now, and the artist I want to be in the future.

10 Pictures of Pop-Culture in the Wichita Area

Here are the 10 pictures I started with to get an idea of the popular culture of Wichita. Since I am not a native, I went with the first things that came to mind when I think of Wichita. Some of these pictures I took myself, and some were found online. I will bold the pop-culture images I used in my actual project.

McDonald's

I swear there is a McD's every 20 feet. I can't escape them.

Gorges Volvo Dealership
My family owns nothing but Volvo cars, and Wichita is the closest (and possibly the only) place where we can get our cars fixed.

Century II
I danced competitively for 5 years before entering college and the majority of the competitions I attended were at the Century II.

Hyatt Regency

I have attended Anime Festival Wichita almost every single year (I started around AFW3, when it was still at the Best Western in Park City), and I always stay at the con's hotel, the Hyatt.

Wichita Skyline

There's a song written called "Wichita Skyline", and I thought that was pretty cool. By the way, not a good idea to pull over on the left shoulder on Kellogg. Kinda scary.

Keeper of the Plains

Of course, everyone picks Keeper of the Plains. That river walk is beautiful too.

Bridge Spires

These are the bridge spires on the bridge next to the Hyatt. Since I've been in that area so much these spires are one of the first things I think of.

Old Town

Like Keeper of the Plains, Old Town is a given.

Cessna Airfield

I tried to get a picture of a plane up close, but I drove into a restricted section with signs alerting me to notify security to gain access into the area I was already in. I decided to not stay long.

Kellogg (photo not mine)

Kellogg is the main road of Wichita (for me, at least).

Week 3 Journal

Today I will explore 5 digitally based fine artists and 5 digitally based concept artists.

Concept Artists

Emmanuel Shiu

I really enjoy Shiu's landscape concept art. He works mainly in film, but his concept landscapes look very video game-esque. This one, for instance, reminds me of Legend of Dragoon for PS1.

Henrik Salström

Salström's forte is in character creation. I really like how different and creative he is with each character.

Andrew Baker

Baker is a concept artist for The Hobbit: The Unexpected Journey. I love how his characters are both fantastical and grotesque.

Bobby Pontillas

Pontillas is a Disney-employed animator. My favorite thing about his concept characters is the animated style. I think it's adorable.

Victor Mosquera

Like Emmanuel Shiu, I love Mosquera's environment concepts. The atmosphere of this one especially is amazing and almost magical.

Fine Artists

Ray Caesar

Caesar's digital paintings are like Neo-Romantic portraits. I love the soft airy backgrounds and a Alice-In-Wonderland-esque subject matter.

Bobby Chiu

Chiu's work is both whimsical and maybe a bit creepy. He bounces back and forth between the two, and I'm a sucker for creepy.

Cristiano Siqueira

Siqueira's work is really commercial and pop-arty, which I like. I think his work would be easy to sell to the masses (and it probably is).

Sarah Rose Oliver

Oliver's digital paintings are so hyper-realistic they look like photographs to me. I love how she purposely keeps brush strokes visible to remind you that this is a painting and not a photo.

Linda Bergkvist

Bergkvist's work is grotesquely beautiful. I absolutely love it. Also, BOOBIES.

Now I will take an artist from each category and compare them.

Emmanuel Shiu vs. Linda Bergkvist

Emmanuel Shiu first started out as a 3D artist and first became a concept artist when working on the PS2 game Rise To Honor. He was not experienced as a concept artist, but was soon hired to design the entire underground world for the movie Hellboy. I like that he started out as a video game concept artist, because it really shows in his work. 

Linda Bergkvist has a lot of controversy to her name. Upon further research, it appears that she painted over copyrighted photos that did not belong to her. In any case, her work (though created through cheating) is beautiful and magical. Her mystical portraitures were even going to be made into a card game before the reveal of her breach of copyright broke out.

Week 2 Journal

This week we are supposed to upload 5 color-corrected images we are using for our first Photoshop project. I thought I had copied those images to my jump drive, but it turns out I didn't. I'm going to do what I think is the next best thing and upload the Photoshop project along with the non-color-corrected images I used and point them out.

Here's my Photoshop project so far.

You can see that the color scheme is kind of a soft, neutral, tan/orange.

This is the piece of marble decoration on the left side of the project image. This is a picture I took back in 2011 when I went to Rome. I have always liked the whole late Antiquity architecture, so I really wanted to use this in my image. However, it looks really out of place in my image, probably due to the conflicting light sources. I will take this out and try something else.

The sky and 'sun' actually come from this picture of a halved lemon. I noticed that I was going pretty literal for most of my image's elements (picture of a shrub to use as a shrub, ocean to use as an ocean, etc.) so I thought I'd try the lemon. I like it, but I need to darken the color of the sky lemon at the edges of the image. Otherwise it looks a little out of place. 

Here's the ocean I used in my image. This is from my extremely recent trip to Laguna Beach, CA, where my dad got re-married. I've always loved the ocean (which sucks because I live in Kansas) and I really wanted to put water into my image. I did have to spot-heal the people off of the beach, and I used some other rock textures to cover up the cacti. Not a fan of cacti.

The shrubs on either side of the image come from this one plant. I need to take one of the shrubs out because it looks a little obvious to me that I just copied and pasted the same plant. I'm not particularly happy with the angle of the sun here, so maybe I need to scrap this shrub altogether. This is from Coronado Heights a few miles out from my hometown.

Back to the ocean. This is a little tide pool full of sea anemones at Laguna Beach. Obviously I flipped the image. However, I left the small wave crest, and I've decided I need to take that out. It doesn't make physical sense if the ocean is farther down hill.

My general picture strategy was to find elements I liked and pray they would work. In that I neglected the light source angle and how that would affect shadow, and it has made me a little unhappy with how things are working out. I've taken more photos since these and I definitely paid more attention to light angle.

Week 1 Journal

This Week 1 Journal will feature 5 collages that really caught my eye.

1. Zac Freeman's Found Object Collages (http://www.lostateminor.com/2010/10/18/zac-freemans-found-object-portrait-collages/)

I chose Zac Freeman's collages (all of them, not just this one) because of how detailed and realistic the collages turn out. I'm very impressed that these objects he found and put together still captured the soul in his subject's eyes.

2. Michel Keck's Pop Art Dog Collages (http://moderndogart.wordpress.com/)

These dog collages by Michel Keck are, needless to say, adorable. They're colorful, dynamic, and just interesting to look at. To me they're very Americana in a way that I like.

3. Nick Gentry's Technology And Oil Paint Collages (http://www.nickgentry.com/artworks/0046.html)

Nick Gentry's collages feature old bits of technology (does VHS count as old?) as a part of the canvass, and paints over them to create his images. I think the use of the outdated technology is cool and modern, and his works are haunting and mysterious.

4. Derek Gore's Recycled Collage Art (http://www.schoolboycouture.co.uk/2011/01/derek-gores-recycled-collage-art/)

These are so cool. Derek Gore's recycled collages are made of magazines, newspapers, and other recyclables. His bright and intense pops of color really caught my eye and the pieces themselves are stoically beautiful.

5. Kerry Miller's Book Cut Out 3D Collages (http://www.kerrymiller.co.uk/)

I looked up 3D art collages on a whim and was not disappointed. Kerry Miller's intricate collage work pushes not only out of the 2D space but off the 'canvass' as well. I've always been intrigued by 3D book art, and Kerry Miller's work is something I'd pay big bucks for.

On the whole, I noticed that I tend to like collages that turned out more realistic than abstract, and that use interesting materials.