Last year I failed miserably at keeping up with this blog. Well, it was my first experience with writing a blog, so I'm just going to chalk it up as a failed first-attempt and good experience, and commit to doing better this year. This should be easier for me to do, as I failed previously due to distractions from more pressing commitments -specifically my MFA workload - and for most of this year this blog will be a part of my coursework. I am required to keep a weekly journal describing my thesis progress during my directed study courses, and this blog will be the embodiment of that. I am hoping that this will get me used to updating the blog regularly so that next year, after I graduate, I will be so used to doing it that I will continue to keep this blog current.
Midpoint Review: Thesis Project Approval
I almost got my thesis approved. The concept itself was approved, but I have to change the number of models I'm going to complete to get full approval and a go-ahead green light. I've been instructed to cut the number of character models down from 6 to 4. I've also been advised to keep the addict character that I've already introduced, the juggler that I've posted snippets of images for previously, my main wooden warrior character, and the satanic leaf-tailed gecko character. My fearless little girl (the title character for crying out loud!) and my cowardly lion have been cut. I'm also texturing the juggler and the addict instead of the warrior and the little girl. I'm still hoping to complete the cut models, just not as part of my thesis project. For now I'm rather dissappointed and have to spend extra time revising my propsal documents, but hopefully this will work out for the best in the long run...
Character #1: The Addict
This is the first of six character designs I have made to model for my thesis project if it gets approved. I have six characters altogether: The addict, the warrior, the fearless girl, the juggler, the cowardly lion, and the satanic leaf-tailed gecko. I posted tidbits of the designs for the warrior and the juggler in previous posts, but I'm choosing to start my more in-depth looks at the characters with the addict because he was actually the first one I came up with out of all of them.
A few years back I started a doodle that, after many hours, became a drawing that looked like this:
I was ecstatic with how the image came out. I love the highly stylized look. It was unlike anything I had ever done before at the time.
Now I have mimicked the style a number of times, and I was interested to see how it might translate into three dimensions. When I was attempting to find an idea to work with for my thesis project I came up with a story that would incorporate a highly stylized character like this with a more realistic version of the same character. The story was about an actor who was so wrapped up in his art that he destroyed all of his personal relationships, including the relationship with the love of his life. After a performance in an elaborate costume and full body make-up, the actor has a revelation about the direction his life has taken and what he must do to change things.
The moment of revelation is my favorite part of the story. The idea was that the audience would be unaware that the character was an actor. It would look like a highly stylized cartoon. The sets and props would all be in the same style as the character and would just appear to be an ordinary cartoon setting. The story being told would be the autobiography of the character's own life - he tells, through actions rather than words, how he started his acting career, met his dream girl, and then got so caught up in his work that he let everything else fall apart. Just after he loses everything he drops to his knees in despair, drops his head down into his hands, and all fades to black. Moments later the light comes up on the actor alone - there is only him among a sea of blackness. He sits with his head in his hands for awhile, pondering his failures, and then raises his head with an awestruck expression. He has realized what he must do to get his life back on track, and when his head comes up, the fingers of his hands stay just where they are, smearing the stylized make-up off of his face in streaks and revealing the character's true nature to the audience. Eventually the character would remove all of his make-up, stand up, and the lights would come up on the rest of the scene to reveal that the revelation had happened after the performance, in a realism-style dressing room. I never fully settled on how I wanted the story to end, but I'm pretty sure it ends with him getting the girl back.
The reason I decided against this story for my thesis is that the project would have focused too heavily on animation, texture, and lighting rather than modeling. There are very few characters and extremely simple settings; plus the characters would all be human. I wanted a bit more diversity in the modeling aspect of it than this story allowed me. As such, I tried out some other story ideas and finally settled on one with statues as "characters" (technically, not all of the statues are characters, some, including this one, would probably be more accurately be classified as "props" because they never participate actively in the story, but I still think of them as characters). I chose the theme of "courage" to unite all of the sculptures in my story exhibit and determined that I could still use this moment of reveal as an image. I changed the actor's background to that of an addict because it seemed easier to explain than the elaborate backstory I had concocted for the original character, but the moment is the same: now the elaborate costume and make-up are a visual symbol of the addict's self destructive behavior rather than literal costume and make-up, but the life changing revelation and cleansing of self is depicted in the same manner.
I spent quite a long time on the character design. I gathered some reference images (below) and then threw away a number of initial designs.
I had particular trouble with the fingers. I kept making them too modular and repetitive. I lost the ever-changing flow from the initial sketch. Eventually I decided to block out the form, tape a sheet of tracing paper over it, and start sketching the hands first. I sketched them as I would normally sketch hands, but with exaggerations here and there; I didn't try to break them down into individually patterned pieces. This worked out much better, and I filled in the rest of the form the same way. I then overlayed another sheet of tracing paper and started the form with the patterns. This is what I ended up with:
I liked this figure quite well, and decided to overlay another sheet of tracing paper to do the color. It had taken me many hours to finish the black and white drawing and I didn't want to chance messing it up with the colors and having to start over again from scratch. I colored for a bit, thinking I'd photograph the final image with light behind it to make both the colors and the black outlines pop through the extra layer of tracing paper, but when I put the pages down on my lightbox and lit it up I realized that every stroke of the markers I was using suddenly became visible. The color was no longer even with the light behind it. I went over the already colored areas with the markers again and it helped. After a third or fourth pass every section I had colored was smooth; my plan would work out after all, but three or four passes of marker, with time for the ink to dry a little in between, takes much longer than a single pass. I spent weeks on that one image, but I think the end result was worth it.
I then moved on to the turn-arounds for the character. These took a bit longer than anticipated too because I used a combination of black and white charcoal for them, which again required multiple passes over the same areas of the image. They were rather fun to draw, though. I especially liked working out the back of the figure: I never really thought much about the back, which isn't visible in my initial design, so when I drew the side view I just had some loose drapery for the back of the shirt. When I got to the rear view I realized how boring that was. Much of the character's line-work in the initial design was anatomically based - it's by no means dead-on muscle for muscle or bone for bone, but it's suggestive of anatomy. For instance, those large poofy shoulder forms I designed as a kind of exaggerated deltoid form without an insertion point. I decided to mimic this approach on the back, then went back to my side view and adjusted it accordingly:
I am really happy with how this character turned out. I can't wait to model it in three dimensions, and am anxious to see it textured as well, though the texturing is not currently part of my thesis proposal. (I have propsed the texturing of only two of the six character models for my thesis, and this is not one of them because I'm a little intimidated by the thought of how long that will take for this figure.)
I look forward to getting to work on this, but that will only happen if my thesis project gets approved on Thursday. Here's hoping!
Preproduction: Week... ???
Hello again world! I know I disappeared for awhile, but I have resurfaced... finally. I have no idea what week number I'm supposed to be on for my preproduction schedule: complications arose and threw everything off and I eventually ended up just doing work as I could rather than following a specific plan.
The last time I posted I was living in Arizona and had just finished a semester of online classes. Now (after a whirlwind of a summer vacation) I am back in California and back to attending classes on campus! (Yes!) I have completed all of my thesis preproduction work and put together my presentation, and I submitted it earlier today. Wish me luck that it gets approved.
It is currently past 4am as I am typing this and I haven't gone to sleep yet, so I am not going to spend the time getting all of the necessary files together now to add to this blog, but this weekend I will begin putting up individual posts on the topic of each element in my proposed thesis project. I will share with you my model designs, ideas about the characters and environment, and any particularly interesting tidbits of information about the process of designing the elements.
For now, I'm still alive. I didn't disappear off the face of the earth - just the face of the internet for 3 months. I will try to avoid such dissappearances in the future. I plan to submit new blog posts much more regularly, though I doubt I'll be able to post every week due to the demands of my coursework - perhaps every two weeks, with bonus posts during slow periods. We'll see how it goes. For now, I'll definitely post at least once more by the end of the weekend with some insight into my character designs for my thesis project, and next week I'll share my joy or grief over the outcome of my Midpoint Review, which is the presentation that determines whether my thesis project gets approved or not.
Also, for anyone who may be wondering - I know I left you in suspense after that last post - my warrior maquette has survived. He's successfully kept his head since the oven disaster. I'm so proud. :)
Preproduction: Week's 2 and 3
Ok. The schedule I made is totally blown already, only three weeks into the summer. Must. Not. Panic....
I have a bad habit of underestimating how long things will take me, and, in this case, a poor idea of just how much I was craving a break after my last two extremely hectic semesters. I also failed to account for how many hours I'd spend on the internet trying to figure out exactly where I'm going to live in the Fall. All of these factors combined add up to the neccessity of me totally rearranging and editing my current summer work plan. Before I get around to accomplishing that, however, I plan to finish my warrior maquette.
I estimated that I would spend about 2 days making this maquette, and so far it's been about 2 weeks. Granted, I haven't dedicated nearly as much time as I planned to to this project (I scheduled 40 hour work weeks for myself, and I've only managed about half of that time in the past 2 weeks), but I also grossly underestimated how complicated what I'm making would be to create. I've sculpted plenty of figures in the past, but that was before I took an anatomy class: now I've become much more anal about body contours since I have a pretty good idea of what they should look like, and the fact that this is a very muscular character does not help the situation: it only increases my propensity for perfection in this area.
I also failed to realize just how difficult my costume design was. It seems so simple on paper, but drawing lines of decorative detail on paper is much different than creating smooth lines of raised detail in clay. I'd roll out clay into long strings, keeping the width as even as I could manage, and then as soon as I pressed it onto the shirt piece on the figure it would become bumpy from my finger pressure. I'd smooth the whole thing out along the entire length of the detail and then try to trim the inevitably uneven sides into an even width, but, even if i managed to get the raised detail fairly even and smooth, the places where my knife indented the shirt along the sides of the "embossing" would now be uneven. I don't even know anymore how many times I've tried to apply the designs only to smooth them all out...
Making this: Look like this:
Is not as simple as it looks...
The solution I came up with to this problem is this: I'd bake the clay tunic base to set it, and only then apply the detail.
This way, after I've smoothed the lines of clay onto the shirt piece and trimmed the width evenly, I won't have those uneven indented lines from my knife in the shirt piece because my knife won't be able to indent the shirt piece - it'll only trim off the excess width. This is the theory - it has yet to be tested.
I truly hope it works, especially after my most recent mishap:
When I baked the figure to set the tunic I layed it down bridged across two blocks of wood, the reasons being thus:
1) The heat from the oven temporarily weakens the clay before making it set stronger, so things are more prone to collapse during baking. I have a wire armature inside my figure, and his body's already been cured in the oven once, but baking still weakens it enough that I feared for its safety if it stood.
2) The figure's tall enough that the raised arm gets uncomfortably close to the oven's heating elements.
3) I didn't want to lay it down flat on the baking sheet because I didn't want the weight of the statue to flatten out the contours on the back of the tunic.
So, I thought a horizontal orientation across the two raised blocks would cover all bases: avoid any foreseeable issues... The thing I hadn't counted on was that apparently I didn't deem it necessary to build the armature all the way up through my figure's neck. I'm really not sure what I was thinking when I did that (clearly I wasn't), and the oversight came back to bite me. His unsupported neck wasn't strong enough to hold up one whole end of his body. He was fine throughout his entire time baking in the oven. When I pulled him from the oven he was pristine. It wasn't until I was twenty feet away that I heard a "pop!" and turned around with a sinking feeling in my gut. It could've been the baking sheet popping because it's a little warped, and heat always affects such things, but somehow I knew it wasn't. I walked back into the kitchen knowing something on my statue had made that sound, and was horrifed to find him headless, laying in two perfectly fractured pieces.
Since this disaster I have tried to fix the figure the best I can. I can't superglue him because he has to return to the oven a few more times before he's completed (and superglue's highly flammable), and I can't work with him in pieces because as soon as I attempt to bake that head piece (which would have to sit on the broken neck base to cure the helmet which will eventually surround his entire head) the contours along the broken edge will soften and inevitably change shape and not fit back together with the body cleanly. So, I used a needle tool to drill a hole down his throat on both pieces and shoved a short piece of wire into them to bridge the pieces together. I also smeared a very thin layer of clay between the pieces to act as an adhesive. Then I smeared another thin layer along the outside of his neck. Due to the fragile nature of the uncured neck joint, I can't smooth this outer layer as much as I would like (since a little pressure makes the whole joint shift its setting) but I'm going to bake it the way it is and see what a little sandpaper can do to remedy the roughness later. For now, I'm afraid to work on him further until I can get him cured, which will hopefully occur tomorrow.
'Til next week!
Amber
Preproduction: Week 1
Off to a bad start! I scheduled my summer workload to start on Wednesday after a family visit concluded, but, alas!, I've been sick since Tuesday! As much as I love my niece and nephew, I can't wait to start living in a house without any small children again - my immune system doesn't seem to be up for the challenge!
So, instead of getting myself off to a great start revising my warrior's character design drawings and building his maquette, I was reduced to spending the majority of my week reading Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey by Emily and Anne Bronte, respectively. I have now read one book by each Bronte sister (having read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte previously) and I can say that, based on the aforementioned sampling, Charlotte is so far my favorite, and Anne manages a close second. I have no very mean feelings towards Emily's work, in fact I rather enjoyed Wuthering Heights, but I had a hard time loving it because I just couldn't see the allure of her so-called "romantic hero". Heathcliff seems much more the villain to me than the great lover I've heard him referenced as. Given the choice of a tortured, villainous romantic hero I'd much prefer Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom to Bronte's Heathcliff (Slight Spoiler Alert Here) - at least the Phantom seems to repent and rank Christine's happiness over his own at the end - the same cannot be said of Heathcliff...
Anyway, I seem to be getting off topic... (Easy to do I suppose when one's topic has as little substance to it as mine does this week.) The sum total of my labors around the family visit and illness was not much at all: two armatures and an initial clay covering of one of those. That's it. No drawings, no finished pieces: two armatures with some clay pressed onto one. Must do better next week. (Thankfully I've scheduled myself as having weekends off, which allows for some catch up time in cases such as this.) So, for now, I bid you adieu, and leave you with this snapshot of my progress:
Fearless
"Fearless" is the title of the animated short that I'm currently working preproduction on. I have strong hopes for the majority of the models in this short to be completed as my MFA thesis project for the Academy of Art University. My progress on this project shall make up the majority of the posts on this blog for the forseeable future.
Fearless is the story of a fine, strong warrior statue carved out of wood. The warrior resides in a private art gallery with eight companion sculptures. One evening, a strange feeling creeps up on him...
...
I have been doing preproduction work on Fearless for a few months now, working around different projects in other classes, and not progressing nearly as far as I would like with this one. That's all about to change: I have an entire summer free to devote to Fearless. I have scheduled my summer workload thus:
The first task on my list is revising and refining my character designs. I intend to make maquettes and multiple drawings of each character. I will update this blog weekly with my progress. For now, here's a teaser from my previous work this past semester:
Hello World.
I don't really know the best way to begin a blog, never having done this before, so I guess I should just jump right on in: both feet first.
After years of meaning to, but never quite getting around to it, I finally have a real internet presence (not just a social networking site available only to my friends). It feels good. It feels right. It feels... more difficult than I expected... but I'm sure I'll get used to it.
So, for the important stuff: I set up this site as a means to get my artwork "OUT THERE" (as the phrase goes). I have been making artwork for years, recieving many accolades from my family and friends, and sometimes fellow students and teachers as I've progressed up the ladder of education. Often have I heard the phrase "I need a piece of art from you so I can say I knew you before you were famous". Well, "famous" may be expecting a little too much from me, but a bit of positive reputation outside of my own intimate circle of family and friends certainly couldn't be amiss. Therefore, in pursuit of this goal, and in an effort to increase my participation out in the world, I am pleased to present my website: may its contents make your day a little brighter!
Hello World!