Reflection #65 – July 23

Madness!

Once again, the month I’ve been looking forward to so much has ended. Art Fight has dominated my daily schedule like nothing else and it was a marathon for my productivity as I had hoped.

Since I have done it last year, I now want to compare my experienced directly.

This time, I was much less occupied with school work as I’m at home, working remotely on my animation project, not much else. It still took a chunk off of every day that I didn’t spent with Art Fight. Knowing this, I had preplanned about 9 projects, of which I managed to finish 7, plus a giftart, commission and an additional revenge I hadn’t accounted for.

All in all, I portrayed 11 characters for Art Fight, which happens to be the exact same amount as last year, of which I claimed to be the most productive month for me yet… I guess that’s very good news, I hadn’t thought I’d manage that honestly ^v^

Something that is knocking me over now, though, is the quality of the works I produced.

I haven’t come out with it until now, that I am not very happy with my works last year produced during art fight. Sure, some of them, I am still proud of, but I think overall, they seemed a bit messy and insecure, probably due to my motto at the time being: quantity over quality. I wanted to test my limits and produce as much as I could, and I think this hindered me in making more of my artworks. Another factor could be that I tried to do something different each time, instead of committing to a single coherent style I can rely on with each project. I want to go on talking about a few of these pieces individually and will describe my process of them.

This animation is the first after slowly approaching the field with my exercises and I noticed how different I approached an animation when I knew I had to colour it as well.

The very first change came from adapting a given character design and turning it into something simple enough to be animated. It was also important to keep in mind the lines all connecting to another so colour bleed would be kept at a minimum. With this one specifically, I thought of how much effort it would take to convey this little story efficiently, and how I could use looped movement for my advantage.

The cape, for example, was planned out at around 24 frames on 2s, which would cover 2 seconds before looping. Drawing this cape proved to be very challenging, so I cut them down to much less (7 frames I believe) which, oddly enough worked much better than trying to loop them in 24 frames. Hair was even simpler; only 3 frames but I also had to do a second iteration of them with some inbetweens during the turn.

I already see how I could go on and on so I wanna leave it here. Just to mention, that I finished 4 animations during the month, which are all more ambitious than everything I attempted last month. This gives me a great motivational boost for my ongoing exercises.

At first I didn’t think I’d have much to talk about with this one, but then I remembered how it marks a change in my method of approaching these bigger Illustrations. I had to rely on colour-picking much from references as the looks of these characters almost entirely come from their references. So I didn’t have to go through the trouble of colour-balancing the bases – which I usually do on separate layers for things like metal, cloth, skin, hair and so on – this time I was simply laying everything down below the sketch layer as is, went over the figure with a multiply shade cutout and merged everything down to paint out the shapes correctly and have a quite refined base as a result. Proper lighting was still made with separate layers for more shade, light, highlights and rimlights but the process was much faster than originally going over every layer and merging everything at the very end. It was a method that proved to be very efficient but I thought couldn’t replicate it when it comes to characters I have to design their colour palette to, which proved to be a false claim…

My most recent project proved to be an eye-opener in that regard.

Here, I had to hand pick every colour I used for several characters. Given this is also a scene with established light-scheme, the environment would also heavily influence how the colours on the characters would react to it. The background and the figures are on separate layers, giving me the chance to figure the colours out as I go. I do so by laying down the main colours for background, side- and main characters and adjusting them going back and forth until I am happy with the overall look, then I can refine the shapes and play around with hue variations and texture. It was very satisfying to work around that way. So the whole process of this project took me 4 days, although I admit I simplified the background chars quite a bit due to my tight time frame but I think this can be a go-to method for any future illustrations. Not quite sure how this technique would translate into more cartoonish-styles but that’s not really a concern to me at the moment.

So, this concludes ArtFight.

Before the month started, I had worked out a portrait of an alternate look of Zavi, which I think I will finish soon, then, I’m uncertain.

Most of the upcoming time will be spent further on my animation project. My goal here is to at least have the storyboard by October to show it off at my school. But I will be doing more designs, moodboards, and background tests as well as a bunch of animation exercises.

One of the biggest challenges for me will be to record the script and work on top of it… which I haven’t done before… actually I haven’t animated over a voice clip ever so that might be part of my animation exercises? We’ll see. The application for the internship was declined sadly, so I’m definitely going back to Uni and it is a bit depressing… still, but eh, can’t change it, will just go on taht way and retry next year or the year after or what not. My mind is trapping itself in the same Limbo I had felt during October 2020. In the end, though it turned out well so I will stay optimistic.

Now what was I… ah, yes. Future projects, I have opened commissions and got at least one interest that will be figured out. Then, a huge thing for me is probably gonna be the full release of Baldur’s Gate 3 in a few days… which I have predestined effective procrastination with >v> Divinity Original Sin 2 served as a great inspiration 3 years ago, so who knows, maybe I’ll do another Fan Art?

This is making me all excited now again.

Alright, I’m hopping off now. Wish you all a nice August!

~Souvillaine