Studio 3 Journal Entry: Week 3

This has officially been one of my most productive weeks in University, ever. I spent 40 hours coming up with ideas and actually creating something half decent from those ideas (I am not very good at expressing my ideas). However, this particular process of working has definitely helped and sparked my motivation.

This process consisted of gathering reference material and sketching out parts or their entirety that I liked.

This was the step I did last week:

From there I selected my favorite designs and created 3D grey box block-outs of these, however i ended up spending a considerable amount of time on these and they have inevitably turned into finished 3D pieces rather than block-outs. However, I love how they turned out and may use them in personal projects in the future.

These are my 3D block-outs:

(I created these images by putting a light in the scene and after a bit of tweaking to get the light right, I rendered out a high quality PNG image)

After this step, I mashed up a combination of aspects that I liked from these houses and that I thought were strong components in Photoshop by using the lasso tool. After I was happy with the desired look I drew over the image and blocked in some shadows.

This was the finished design:

After this, I spent 'again way too much time' on on assigning a colour to each aspect that I wanted coloured onto a separate layer. After this i played around with colours. This was quite fun! I manually changed the colours on 6 houses, then i duplicated these houses and played with the 'hue and saturation', making minor adjustments where necessary.

From there I duplicated these again and added shading onto them so i could see what the designs would look like when combined with shading.

These are the 12 colour designs with their shaded companions next to them:

After this, I chose 2 favorites and mashed up their colour palettes to finally end up with this design. Once I thought I was done with this, I was told that the dark outlines were a little harsh, so I went over all the outlines with a darker colour of its surrounding colour using a clipping mask, and i must say that that made a good difference.

The image on the left is the design with the outline: The image on the right is the design with the coloured outlines but no shading:

The design below is the final design with the coloured outlines and shading:

Once the building was finally done and dusted, I moved onto the characters.

Although my intention is to have the characters remain as silhouettes, I was curious to see how they would look if they had features.

Below are the initial sketches I drew last week:

I chose my final silhouettes that I felt were most impact-full:

I began this process by looking up reference images and I found a few inspiring images. I chose to keep their features minimal and straight lined to keep with the minimal feel. I didn't even use a tablet for this, just the mouse with the shift and click method. For the colours, they could be subject to change, however I really like the blue's and orange's, as I feel these colours would look good in the final scene. I actually like how these turned out so much that I could see myself using these coloured designs instead of simple silhouettes, but we shall see what happens.

Below are the final character designs:

For the trees, I started with the same method as above, by gathering reference material and sketching out the designs I liked.

Below are my sketches from last week:

I picked out the designs I like the most and went over them to give them clean lines and refine aspects of them. From here I used the 'magic wand' tool and the 'paint bucket' tool to assign colours to different parts of the trees. After this, I tweaked the colours to suit and refined the paint bucket edges.

Below are my final tree designs:

After all this was done I put together a lookbook which I am actually really happy with. I took inspiration from some show reels I saw at the exhibition last trimester and I added in some headers and footers to my slides to make them look more professional. I had lots of fin this week but I am a little drained to be honest, but hopefully this next week will still be a productive and motivating one.