Reflection #45 – September 21

Ahh, I’ve arrived a little late for this one.

The past three days I was heavily occupied with an intense animation course: working from 9am to 10pm for three days. It was very exhausting but also a lot of fun in the end – particularly due to to great people involved in the project.

In hindsight, it was a very enriching experience to see how working in a team and under a very tight deadline can be. And despite us not getting all finished with the project, it felt like an accomplishment in the end.

Now for what has happened this month.

As previously mentioned, the month started out quite busy with not much time on my hand but plenty of things to work on in time. I finished a little birthday gift and hopped right on to the vulture awareness piece, researching what species would be this year’s pick.

I chose the cinereous vulture for the particularly poofy necks and significantly bright heads sometimes.

After a couple of sketch-studies, which you can find >here< I assumed the same approach could also fit the main image and for as simple as it is, it did work out just fine, even though I happened to ‘finalize’ it multiple times and still found a way to come back to it and change just a small error I noticed. Yeah so take more time to look over the final thing before ‘finishing’ it.

After this, I spent some time shortly animating small storyboards but dismissed them due to their roughness. The upcoming workload of my school project demanded me to produce quite a lot of background images hence taking a lot of time to get done.

I had an idea for a piece with Jasper about midway through the month but scrapped it after the lining phase because I just couldn’t get my head around how to tackle this project even though I still like the idea. Maybe I will try another attempt when I have more experience with painting a more complicated scene.

So I still wanted to do something until the end of the month so I decided to put some pressure on and accept one of my friend’s commissions for their new character design… which turned out to be more complicated and time consuming than I originally expected. Since it was just two fullbody shots (one back- and one front facing) and no clothing applied) and the concept phase being completed very quickly, I assumed it was safe to say this wouldn’t take more than a week. Buuuut I spent about twice as much on the entire thing in the end. The progress was just very slow for some reason and the scales of the wing-digits particularly were a pain to make. I think a good thing to do would have been blocking out more vague shapes first and deviate from the slim form of the ‘fingers’.

But all in all I am very pleased with the result and I’m happy my friend shared this feeling with more emphasis ^v^

So October will be very eventful for me. Next semester is gonna start tomorrow and we finally got to visit lectures in person. Which is a very nice change, although I’ll have to adapt to this old habit of ‘going to school’ again actually.

Simultaneously, I’ll be working on the animation project as well as some private pieces that will be in the spirit of the month; I got a couple of monsters on my list that I want to portray and maybe I can even produce a new exciting design I got planned for the ‘finale’ of the month. We’ll see how it goes, I’m definitely brimming with excitement!

I wish you all a wonderful new month and keep up the holiday spirit!

~Souvillaine