Reflection #50 – March 22

Welcome once again to this month’s reflection!

After the very eventful, busy and depressing last parts, I’ll try t finally get back on track with these jorunals so let’s get right into it.

I have transitioned into my third semester at university and successfully completed the last. While it felt too short overall, I was still happy to get back to school after my vacation was over. I needed the change of pace again, but most of all, the interaction of my classmates. Something beyond my desk to help get me going as well as the urge to learn more fields. What I’m very looking forward to is audio production, especially since I have ever only produced silent animations and films so far as my knowledge of audible design is pretty much zero, which improved a little as of now but I still need some more input and – most of all – experience in the field.

The workload is once again pretty daunting, especially after the stressful last semester, but I know I’ll come out with valuable knowledge that I can use for personal projects from there on.

Speaking of projects, I did have a couple this month so let’s have a look at them:

On my 2 week-long stay at my family’s, I brought my switch and the newly acquired game ‘Hades’ by Supergiant Games, which featured a beautiful and extraordinary cel-shaded/comic book style. I was pretty shattered during this time, with what was and is going on in Ukraine. It completely changed what I wanted to portray in my art and the thematic of violence was quickly abandoned. I felt the need to turn to one chapter of my artistic journey that managed completely without and so I returned to the rather peaceful void that Absinthe and Souvillaine reside in. Together with the inspiration from Hades, I adopted this style for this experiment and see how it would influence my usual method of drawing and rendering.

It wasn’t entirely easy to get back to, at first and I had t resist the urge to blend the render to stay true to the original. Thankfully, I could trick a little with the effects so you’d see a tiny bit of blur and gradients with them and in the background. All in all, it has been a quite refreshing experience and a reminder to keep trying out new styles for a change and see what sticks to mine. For example, I really like how the random blue and orange accents give this a otherworldly vibrant feel and the harsh mix of layer modes can further bring the render to new heights despite or rather because of the simpler cel-shading method.

This one – a private commission I took – has been in preparation for almost 6 months starting in October. Back then I knew I wasn’t gonna be able to work on it before my exams ended and I sort of was right. I merely did some concepting before my final one where the work-load wasn’t as heavy. For the first concept, I had planned to create a 3D model of a pool table for easier composition and planning but then scrapped it because I was doing so many concept sketches that revolved around character posing, the table became almost irrelevant xD It took quite a while until we’ve all found something that everyone liked equally but in the end, it was important to me to be working on something I was down for completely. Over the course of one month, I finalized this project, which took a lot longer than I’d wanted to but a myriad of reasons prevented me from completing it sooner… ah well :I

Still, I’m very happy how it turned out, given how rarely I work on scenes these days and I managed to pull of a quite good composition from what I could tell from the feedback it got.

Nevertheless, I need to remind myself that I probably will have less time to work on personal projects, also I need to grip myself to reduce my gaming time, as it’s taken hold of me as of late >M<

Nothing particular is planned, which is a bummer right now and I’m afraid to say anything out loud anymore because I’ve become so unreliable as of late. What I do like to share as the last thing is that I’m happy how my style is developing. I’m experimenting more in that regard and take care of developing my visual aesthetic in a more specific direction. I’ll just need to find a way to make it fitting with multiple themes.

Until then, I’ll see you at the end of April and I wish you’ll be safe and fortunate.

A nice weekend!

~Souvillaine