Cerys Ford Computer animation arts

The aim of our first project was to introduce us to the idea of concept painting and digital painting. For this, we were given a series of cities from Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible cities’. We had to draw a series of thumbnail sketches for each city, and after that we chose our favorite city to do three digital paintings on; an exterior establishing shot, a exterior low angle shot and an interior establishing shot. I chose the city of Ersilia because out of all the cities I had the most inspiration for it, and I felt like I could take it in an interesting, creative direction. I had multiple ideas for the city, so I had to decide on having the city move on wheels as I felt I could execute that idea the best out of all the Ideas I had. When it came to the composition of the paintings, I was most inspired by the overall feeling of the city when it was described in it’s entirety, with the web of strings, the city itself, and the tents on the mountainside. It was important to me to get s

 Every Friday since the beginning of term, we have had tutorials that go into the basics of photoshop. They went over things like selction tools, photo manipulation, clipping masks and animated GIFs. They mainly served as a refresher for me as I have used Photoshop before. However, I did find exporting an animated GIF extremely useful as I had never done it before, and it came in handy when I had to create the GIFs for my final digital paintings in the invisible cities project. Unfortunately, I don't have any of the files from these sessions as I thought I had saved them to one drive but I cannot find them. I will probably update this post once I find them again.

                                                   

 

 

                            Here are my exercises attempting 1,2 and 3 point perspective. I thought it was important to get a decent amount of practice in perspectives as I havent really specifically looked at and practiced perspectives in my work. I found 1 point perspective the easiest to grasp, but when I moved on to 2 point perspective I found I had to put a lot more practice in to get it, but once I did, it made a lot of sense. 3 point perspective was similar, and I'm not entirely sure if I've fully got it just yet, but I'm not going to need it as much as 1 and 2 point perspective in my digital paintings.  

 

 

Since I decided on doing my idea of having Ersilia on wheels, I decided that it would be a good idea to do a bit of practice of drawing Elephants. I started by doing the redlining in the top left corner, which was mainly to help me visualise the Elephant's proportions and the shapes that make up the body. After I did that, I moved on to the sketch in the bottom right, which was loosely inspired by the pose in the image I redlined. after that, I decided to work from some photos to help me get the head and the body from different angles.  While these definetly aren't perfect, I was very happy with the results, and I feel a lot more confident on getting the anatomy of Elephants right in my final concept pieces.

These are the influence maps I did for both Isaura and Ersila. Through this process, I realised that I had a lot more inspiration for Ersilia and was generally more excited about working on Ersilia, so I decided to go with that city. The second and the third influence maps were for the two ideas of how I would visualise Ersilia. Before I made the influence maps, I liked both of the ideas equally, but through doing these maps I realised that I liked the 'city on wheels' idea more, so that is the idea I'll be going with.  The last influence map is for my enterior shot, which will be a shrine to the elephants that pull the city along. In my mind, the people would honour and respect the elephants as an essential part of how the city or Ersilia functions, just as much as the strings. I will definetly need to practice drawing elephants at some point, as I don't have much experience.

This is the finished masterstudy from the environment session on the 3rd of november. With this study, I wanted to focus primarily on the different tones within the painting. I also used this as an opportunity to experiment in Photoshop. While I am quite happy with the final result, I can see many things I need to improve apon, such as the size, scale and detail on the building.

  This is my last set of thumbnails, which were done in photoshop. I wanted to explore my two favourite cities further, as I was having a lot of trouble deciding which city I wanted to do for my final concept pieces. For Isaura, I wanted to explore the style of the buildings more, which were inspired mainly by the ancient city of Petra.  For Ersilia, I wanted to explore how the city would actually move, which split into the two main concepts of having groups of buildings on wheels which are pulled along by elephants, and giant platforms on huge mechanical legs. I still haven't fully decided on which city I want to do yet, but from this I am leaning towards Ersilia. Next, I'm going to do influence maps for both cities, and that should help me decide.

These are the last set of traditional thumbnails that I was able to complete on Saturday. With these thumbnails, I wanted to try and make each city more unique from each other, and not just series of boxes. My favourite cities are still the same, which are Isaura and Ersilia. To help me decide, I'm going to do some digital thumbnails that explore each city more.

These are the next set of thumbnails which I was able to complete last week. I think I was able to get better at drawing thumbnails as I did more, but towards the end of this set I was finding that alot of them were turning out too similar for my liking. My favourite cities are still Ersilia and Isaura, but out of this set I enjoyed Thekla the most.

  These are Thumbnail sketches I did for the first couple of cities from the hidden cities excerpts. Before doing the thumbnails, I analysed the scripts and wrote down some ideas I had for each city. I had a bit of trouble understanding the writing style at first, but I feel I still got some good inspiration from the scripts. I think I struggled with Isiodora the most, mainly because I got the least ideas from the script, so I don’t think I’ll be doing that city. My current favourite cities to draw were Ersilia and Isaura, which I found interesting as I enjoyed those cities the least when I did my first read through of the excerpts for hidden cities.