Reflection #30 – May 20

I don’t really know how to start, uhm…

It feels like this month didn’t even exist to be honest. It all merged together, all the time I’ve spent, but to be real, neither did the last three months. Since I self-quarantined days started feeling monotone even though may schedule didn’t change much. Maybe it’s that I don’t have anything to plan out for, I can’t do much with nobody and the days I spent with friends have usually been the days I either started looking forward to or back to if they passed me.

I continuously feel more insecure about the future and this is due to the current situation and I am almost certain that my hobbies are the main thing that really help me through this time. And I want to continue being productive since days without progression hit hard on my mood.

That said, I am happy to look back at this month and see a stable increase in productivity in comparison to April. I don’t really know why, maybe a stronger urge than last month or because I took more freedom in choosing what to turn into a project.

Artworks

Chimera Squad – Torque [Fanart]

Playing the new XCOM game, I started to sketch some nagas and turned one of them into a fanart. It grew bigger than I planned initially, and I remember tweaking and moving Torgue’s lines for hours even during the shading phase.

I thought about adding some enemy fire to give her pose and expression some more context but I guess that would have just been too many effects to harmonize with the rest of the image.

But all in all, I like how it turned out, working on the background also has been a fun change to what I usually do.

Jasper – Lest we Forget

Then, I attempted to return to a concept that I once tried last year – I believe – and failed at it. Managing to portray two characters in a car together is still really tricky and I had to do some trickery here to manage it well. Aside from that, I had to copy the car from resource and move it in place. Now looking at it, I believe I should have done more with that and create a more compressed interior. I also resisted to add some motion blur to the background to make it look like the car was moving, but I think this scene could just as well work in a standing car and them waiting for a signal or something to happen.

Yeah it was definitely nice to come back to continue Jasper’s story a little more even though doing these tattoos has been overly frustrating for no reason.

Fruit Hat [2020]

And at last, the fruit hat piece that I announced I would do. I actually just did this because of a mood swift and I needed something to cheer me up. First two attempts didn’t work so well, third one worked out. But I also did some more processing on it than anticipated. In many ways, this is different from last years fruit hat piece but most prominent is the tonal shift. While it preserves its surrealistic ambience, this is a bit more grounded, like the ‘sanctum’ I talked about in its description.

When compared to the predecessor, I’m glad to say how much my rendering has improved. Everything else is more what I focused to improve on.

Upcoming stuff & preplanning

So, I still haven’t made much progress on either of the storyboard-animations. This month I’m planning to purchase the upgrade to CSP to get to it finally. I’ve only made sketches to illustrate some designs but nothing so far developed that I’d post them here. And as normal projects… hmm maybe some artworks from concept designs of the storyboard. I’m sure there will be some that can be utilized.

Also, there’s one design I’m currently working on and it is probably the silliest thing I’ll ever make a project of. Then there’s probably something I forgot to mention, we’ll see how far I can come with this completely new medium of animation.

Now I gotta take a break, today I had a barbecue and I am full and finished.

~Souvillaine