london postings.

Almost exactly a month after my previous post, I return. I'm not sure whether I should apologise for the lack of posting or if it's sort of warranted due to my situation... I think i'll go with the former for now, and say sorry for being crap. I haven't decided yet whether i'm doing badly or not. This is possibly because I decided to abandom my schedule for the summer, and therefore don't really know where I could/should/would be. Initially I had planned to complete all concept art and have my models animation ready for my return to falmouth. I ended up forgetting that, not due to unfeasability (although this more than likely would've been the case) but more to allow myself a little (a LOT) more freedom as far as concept art goes after a chat with Andy on the situation. In hindsight i've definitely created less work by not abiding to my former schedule, but just like the Talking Dog project I probably would've failed the schedule and just gotten myself worried. None of this is really making sense, but my feelings right now are fine. I've just completed my first full character concept, I have 2 months til I return to uni, one til I return to falmouth, and i feel comfortable.

Like I said, i've not decided yet whether i've been working enough. But I have been working, even though i've not been posting. If you've not yet guessed, this will probably be a ridiculously long post :P Quickly, my current situation is as follows. I'm living in my girlfriend's house in London, painting when she's at work and relaxing the rest of the time. I'll be here for the next 4-5 weeks until the 25th when I leave for Leeds Festival. I'll be returning home to Wales right after, around the 1st of Sept, then heading straight to Fal shortly after that. I'm thinking my return to fal will be when the work really starts to get going. I'm painting here but I find that I thrive in the studio environment and when I return I will be completely focused on work. I'm really looking forward to that, and REALLY want to make something I can be proud to show at the end of the year.

Workwise: I'm fairly happy with the concepts i've been producing. I found it difficult to knock them out when I was in Wales but I just about managed it, and have started the painting. I'm not sure how I feel about my first completed concept yet, but at the very least it's not bad, passable. I think i'll have a more cohesive idea when everything starts coming together. (Read through to the bottom to check him out :D)

INSPIRATION

Alright here's a little section on the things that've been exciting me recently. I've been compiling some images but sadly I left them on my computer at home, but I'll chuck them up when I get the chance. For now check this out.

Illustrative Rendering in Team Fortress 2 ---LINK

Team Fortress 2 is a game that i've never actually played. I've only seen videos but nevertheless I think it's a brilliant game, but solely from a visual standpoint. And judging by the hype the people love it for the gameplay, too. When searching for concept art from the game on a whim, I came across the brilliant article above ^^^. If you take a read through it covers most visual aspects of the game, in a reasonable amount of detail. I'd love to find out more about the modeling and rigging procedures but I'm thrilled to get any sort of insight into the production of REAL games.

GAYYYYY I literally just wrote a load of other crap and the blog fucked it up -.- ugh. Oh well, look at the pretty pictures -.-



Also read this: http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4338&page=2

and this is important: The look needed to be inspirational and it needed to project "fun" rather than "hardcore."

Quoted from the above page. This is what I want!!

lovely stuff. Check out the links for moar.

Gotta cut this short, BRB!

EDIT: Kind of lost my thread, I know I posted this ages ago and I stopped cause I was interrupted by 3 girls who were also staying in Hannah's house at the same time as me. They came home and were living in the living room where the computer is.. blahblah. It really is quite difficult to post here, so i'm not gonna give myself a hard time about this being the second time that i've visited here lol. I'll just carry on with chatting crap.

I was initially going to use this post to chat about the artists that i'd been admiring on Conceptart.org along with that article above and some other game concept art, but shinier things have caught my eye since then, so i'll talk about the other stuff another time :D But make sure to check out that link^ awesome stuff.

Final Fantasy XIV Online

This is one of the games that i'm most hyped for currently. (I really buy into hype lol.. can't help myself, I even think that sometimes I enjoy the hype more than the actual games.) I am an avid fan of the Final Fantasy Series and I ploughed far too many hours into Square Enix's last online FF. Obviously i'm going to be dying to play the next one. Well, sort of. Massively Multiplayer Online RPGS (MMORPGS) are double edged swords. Horribly addictive but brilliantly rewarding, they can eat your life if you're not careful. But i digress, i'll just chat about this from an aesthetic standpoint.

There is little known about the game at this point, but recently the WEBSITE was updated with a nice little bit of information, and some beautiful artwork.





These are some of the character models, you can get some higher res pictures on the site itself, but anyway I bloody love them. Sadly this is probably my inner fanboy talking but I can't silence him D: I won't bother pouring over them but I just love them, and the rest of the aesthetic of the game. Make sure to check the link and check out the landscapes as well. Beautiful stuff.

Here's a gameplay vid which excites me even more!



However shakily recorded and pixelated it might be, just looked at that green grass and the blue shadows of the mountains. Amazing. The gameplay may look a little static which might be strange to those not used tothe genre, but look at the animation of the Dodo enemies. LOOK at the detail of the environment! I love it all, it'd be amazing to be creating that one day...

Finally, here are some of the paintings that i've been doing while in London. None are finished but let me know what you think. Many more will be popping up when I return to falmouth! :D

Hmmm... looking at those pictures on this computer does not please me at all... they look horrible. I can only hope that that is a result of the compression from uploading and not what they actually look like on a non-laptop computer. :////

EDIT: Taken them down cause they look so bad!