Reflection #59 – December + January 23

So, I literally forgot that yesterday, January ended – I totally lost track of time the last couple of days.

I decided to let it rest for next morning and here I am! Finished a pair of sunny-side-ups for breakfast and reminiscing about the past TWO months.

Starting with school work, most of my time has been occupied by our game project; mainly creating assets of props and the playable area. And despite some hiccups here and there that caused me headaches, I had lots of fun modelling and can easily imagine doing more in the future as long as I am in a bigger project to work for. Now, with texturing, I didn’t have as much fun, but as it’s a new(er) field for me, I should give it another shot sometime.

As the game was finished earlier this month, I can happily and proudly say that I was part in the making of it. It’s not much but we all had a crash course in making one and everyone learned something new.

Other than that, I can’t really remember much happening in School during December.

Of course, I went on a little family vacation over the holidays. Christmas has been rather quiet but enjoyable, even for the vegetarian that I am <v<

Though with my Birthday, the real fun began, as it also marked the first day of Furvester; a fur con, which coincidentally took place during my vacation, on my Birthday and in the town where my family lives in 😀 The only downside to all that was, how little time I had to actually meet up with my family members. This and managing all that we had to do, getting the last bus to get us home and figuring out what to do and where to be had me stressed out a little bit.

Eventually though, I think it was a great time and I really hope I get to attend the next convention. The future is quite cloudy though, mainly due to when to make my internship-semester, as the decision is not all in my hands. I’ll just stay positive and see what this year brings.

Landing in January, a lot of school work and deadlines greeted me. A few smaller homeworks, the game project of course and – now more recently – designing my own website, which has me all occupied. And I am glad it’s a school project, especially as the start has been quite troublesome… without a grade to make and a deadline to spur me on, I think, I would have dropped it there. Now, I’m happily working on a platform of my own that should be mostly finished by the end of this week.

Heading to my personal pieces finally, starting with:

December for me is the month of giving, hence a giftart is in order. I would have loved to make more, but the days grew shorter and so did my time for personal art.

Well, this year, I dedicated my time to one of my ‘childhood’ inspirations to start drawing in the first place: TrueMG – used to watch his Let’s Plays but also gladly followed his art journey, that is until contact broke off after he retired his YouTube channel. I have to thank Twitter that I found him back, luckily he still goes by the same pseudonym and yeah, have been contemplating a lot what to draw for him, then eventually settled with an art of his persona and cats… now about the cats: As I started this, I thought I’d struggle with the human face and hands and while I did have my shortcomings with the hand part – the face actually worked out nicely and was done rather quickly… the cat however (I’m looking at the one in his arms) was so infuriatingly complicated to get done, I don’t know why xD I spent days just trying to fix it, went back and forth, tried different tail positions, neck, shoulder and back positions, it was a pain >v<

Also for a very long time, I didn’t know how to shade the whole thing, it all started to make sense after editing the background (on the last day or so) and was able to finish it fluidly. Am quite proud of it as well and he really liked it ^v^

Axel has been neglected for far too long and I really wanted to start drawing him again. More with an experimental style and not much time on my hands, I quickly worked this out in one weekend. I had started out with the idea for a very strong and tensed-up pose to underline his fighting theme. Looking back at it, I’m very happy with the shapes on his jacket, I should experiment more with strong shapes in clothing and drapery.

The beginning of the year had left a sour taste in my mouth, as it started with a mediocre illness in my stomach. This and a rather harsh motivational deep, with lots of degrading thoughts poisoning my mind had me in a bit of a vent mood, sketches really didn’t work out with what I had in mind so I took pictures of me and copied the most inspiring one. As I really like the pose still, I think the shoulder blades stand out too much and there is no transitioning from the furry neck to the upper back, which nag me a bit. Otherwise I’m happy I made this, the colourful effects are what stand out to me most positively. Though I would have wished for a better start to the year.

Continuing, I had this idea in my head for a while now, probably ever since a friend recommended me the song ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ by Onicks. On the subject, I got most reminded of my trouble-cat Jasper and his life continuing to spiral down into a criminal life. I had also previously planned to introduce a secondary figure to his life, that’s comforting at first and helping him out of a depression, only to drag him deeper into trouble. Yes that’s the – yet conveniently labelled – Bonnie in this pic, for whom I have to come up with a better name. Anyway, after the miserable period before it, I wanted to do something striking and light again. Didn’t know how to compose this picture at first, tried playing with 3D models and foreshortening but eventually, just playing around with my sketches worked out fine and I settled on this concept pretty quickly. But starting with the background, I quickly realized that this wouldn’t be finished in a single weekend, so I spread out the work load over the following week. Colouring and shading wasn’t at all hard, just needed some experimenting and eventually found a blank white background over a simple shape did the trick quite nicely. Also I did some searching and the last artwork I did to feature a plain white background was done in 2016 😮 It’s interesting where things develop to :3 So yeah the last thing I want to mention about it is the motion blur and chromatic aberration which really intensify the whole thing… and maybe a bit too much. I am very pleased with this piece and maybe it’ll hang on my wall one day.

As for future works, I have to continue working on my website for a little longer as the last project for school this semester. I got another project in the works, this time featuring Zavi and it’s a bit intense. Hopefully, I can finish it this weekend, though as of now I’m unsure how to render the whole thing… we’ll see!

Alright, I think this wraps it up nicely, don’t have much more time anyway. Hope that February brings good things for a change.

~Souvillaine