Intro

I have been very busy lately working on a comic book page styled intro for our game "Terminal" and I thought I should give you an update of what I have been doing.

As we had a storyboard assignment for the 2D course last week I thought I could kill two birds with one stone, since it was practically the same thing that I needed to do for this project. I reworked and added to a very basic storyboard that I doodled up very early in the project and when I was done with the 2D assignment I chose the most important frames to tell the story and arranged them like a comic book page.

This is the assignment I handed in, the Swedish text is a short description of the story being told, ...

and here is what I have done so far.

To keep it cohesive I have started with making all frames in grey scale, all the while focusing on work speed rather than detail, when I am finished I will start thinking about textures and colour. I will go more into detail of the how and why when I am done in one of my weekly blog posts and I will leave you with the one that is complete.

Colour

Today we have studied light and colour theory, going through how light behaves and determines the colours. To study this we got to look at a lot of photographs of different environments, lighting and surfaces. This as well as getting to see an amazing artist create beautiful scenes and landscapes super fast was really interesting and I was inspired to try it for myself. After waiting all day we finally got to the practical part where we were asked to choose a triad (one colour and two colours adjacent to its complementary colour) of colours from colorschemedesigner.com and colour a very simple drawing of a face using the two similar colours as midtone and shadow and the third one for light. I chose to go with a dark purple for shadow, a cold blue for midtone and light yellow for light, I kept in mind what I learnt today about colour being more saturated in shadow and desaturated by light.

This is the image we got to work with.

We had about an hour for this assignment and this is how it turned out. A tip we got was to create a black and white filter so that you can see if the values look right since it is easy to get confused by colours and you can see the result of that underneath.

I am feeling really inspired to continue working with colours and I will try to put all that I have learnt so far into the background image for Terminal that I am working on at the moment.

Speed Painting

Today we had a lecture with Felicia about values and a little bit about Photoshop. We looked a little bit at different brushes and brush settings and experimented with using brushes in color dodge and linear dodge mode. We also looked at some short films showing the difference in hue, saturation and value and how you can create environments really fast in gray scale using foreground, middle ground and background.
After lunch we got to do some exercises using what we learnt earlier. We were shown photos of mountain landscapes in gray scale and given fifteen minutes to draw it. The purpose of this exercise was to start thinking about value when drawing, it also makes you think about contrast and how to use atmospheric perspective.

This was the first one, I think it looks a bit flat as time went by really fast.
















Here I realized I needed to work faster and I managed to get some atmospheric perspective into it. You can see that the further back something is, it has less contrast and is lighter while the foreground is the darkest part. Also you can see that the mountains are darker at the top and lighter at the bottom, creating contrast to the next level of mountains' dark tops.

This one did not turn out very well, it was a picture of treetops with thick mist between them and time just ran out way too fast. I should probably have used the tree brushes instead as I would have been able to do more a lot faster, I should also have used a different brush for the mist. My attempts at atmospheric perspective got lost somewhere in the mist.



















 
This is the final one, a picture of snowy mountain tops. I think it looks ok but it could definitely use some more work to it and I am not too happy with the contrast between the grounds in it, it should be clearer what is in the foreground. In general I think it reads well though, especially when you zoom out a bit you can clearly see the snow coming down the mountain side.

I think it was a good exercise and it is definitely something I should practice more. I had thought of doing this with the background image I am working on for our game and now I am sure I will. I think drawing it in gray scale first will improve the quality of the values in the image greatly since it is not something I am very used to working with or thinking of.

Representing or Misrepresenting?

Today we was the first day of the second 2D-course, we had a short lecture and then a workshop of how we portray and interpret things. The workshop was designed to automatically fail as we were given the task to, in small groups, find a group of people that is completely different from the members of the group and then find images that portray that group as they want to be portrayed. It was not so much about creating a good presentation as it was an exercise showing how affected we are by our own perspective, seeing how difficult it is to portray a group the way they are and not as the stereotypes we believe they are.

We started by trying to list who we were, covering our different ethnicities, gender, social background etc. We also created a short list of who we were not, even though doing this it was very difficult to choose a group of people. There were several examples that came up but I realized that no matter how we tried, we eventually got back to stereotypes and our own preconceieved ideas. It is difficult to find what, for instance, a culture thinks represents themselves, their values and what is important to them when you are from a completely different background. Those aspects may be things we would never think of since they are not important from people from our culture. Even in the group we were from different cultures in a way with our different ethnical parentages, gender and varying social backgrounds.

It is very difficult but I feel it is a valuable lesson to learn and that it is far to easy to forget that not everyone is like yourself and think the same way you do. I did find a very interesting text that I feel explain part of this very well. In this case the author discusses why anime characters are white and comes to the conclusion that they are not, a Japanese viewer will interpret the character the way they feel is normal, as Japanese, while an American will interpret the same from what they feel is normal, being American. I do not think this is applicable to all situations though, there is still the issue with stereotypes which defines how the public see themselves and others. It does however make you think and question why you assume that everything is like you, why is your culture/ethnicity/whatever what is normal?

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