Hey I've been working on my scenery and back grounds lately tell me what you guys think. Many of the paintings are going to mapped to 2d plains. Though other parts are going to be projected on low res 3D Sculpts so it creates more realistic Parallax. all of the paintings where painted with water color and have had minor color tweaking in Photoshop due to scanning wash out but thats about it.
Maxim Vs Cosmo So the assignment this week in Media Criticism was to compare and contrast the two great modern American magazines of Cosmo and Maxim. At first when I first was given this assignment I thought that there would be a lot of major differences between these two magazines. One publication being a more fashion beauty and focused women’s magazine while the other a more gadget and entertainment men’s magazine that is maxim Though after thoroughly reading through both the magazines I found out they had more in common then they had differences. The most noticeable thing about the two magazines initially is how many advertisement each magazine has before actually having a substantial article or let alone the table of contents. Though after the initial rush of product placement I thought there would at least be one major difference between the two magazines. Each magazine approached the same themes of sex, money, fashion, and celebrity though each came from it in a different manner. Maxim’s article where smaller over all and had a more direct approach of talking to the reader. There also was a very fake aura of, “Hey we’re cool and just one of the guys approach.” In Cosmo there was more of a feel good approach to the articles they had a very friendly demeanor as if they were very self assuring. Though when it came to what they talked about it was more of the same how you can spice up your sex life or how once again the orgasm is important. I feel like both seem to pander to the worst qualities of our society today. The magazines for the most part seemed like more of a vice for product placement and advertisement than actual articles and entertainment. I feel like this is one of the major reasons why print is dying no one is really saying anything. How many ways can you write an article about what is a better sex position or which home town hottie secretary is the hottest coed. It is funny because it is almost like each magazine riffs of each other this month the big interview in Cosmo was Kim Kardashian where they spent a substantial amount of time reassuring the readers that she was more than a TV show and a sex tape while in Maxim they did the history of the sex tape have a big part of all about Kim’s famous tape. There are differences between the two magazines though they seem to have way more in common. They both dumb down the reader and simplify them to being only a money loving sex crazed individual. Either way I’m going to go on with my life and continue ignoring the both of these publications.
Yesterday I started up the blogging again yesterday. Thought looking back I set things in motion on a completely different path than this blog was meant for. I got carried away and I didn't post any art. So to make up for that since this is an ART Blog, here is the character design for my first project in my sculpting class at SVA. The class is being taught by the great Dave Cortes of http://www.inuart.com/. He is known for making amazing action figures for companies like Hasbro Toys and Marvel. If you are an avid toy collector I'm sure you have seen his stuff. Lately he is know for making the toys for the Hell Boy comics and movies.
Here's the model sheet I created for the first sculpt. Though I'm not really sure what this guys back story is yet I have some thing cooking but, I wanna see what you guys feel his deal is.
I will post some the art from thesis in a few days, I hope it is well received.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Hey sorry its been a while I am just not to good at this blog writing stuff. I am back at the School of Visual Arts for senior year 2.0. I finished up my time at visual goodness and took the rest of the summer off to concentrate on my senior thesis. Thesis is a 2 to 3 minute animated short, that I have been working for what seem like 2 years now. I will periodically use this blog to update you on my thesis progress. Though as part of my first semester at school I have decided to take a media criticism class and being part of that class requires me to keep a blog. Now I had set up a specific blog for media class but it seems that Google and Blogger have forgot where they have put this new blog so to make things less complicated I will be using this established blog as my blog to post for that class. So if you come to my blog for an update and instead of art you see some off the wall posts about liberal ideas and general pessimism about media today don't be alarmed it is just for this class.
Okay here is the original post I wrote for that blog thank god for saving it in word.
So a bunch of my friends know that I have been working at Visual Goodness for the last couple of months on a very exciting Project for me as an intern. I have done a lot of 3D work and some Motion Graphics work. Though what has taken up the bulk of my time has been “The Arena Project”. “The Arena Project” is an online turned based Flash Web game that has been a pet project at VG for a while now. I have excitingly been put in charge of Character design and general concept art. For now I am going to show you a few of the rejected monster sketches that have been done for the game and I hope you enjoy.
So when I last finished I was just starting my internship at Visual Goodness. I have been at visual goodness for four months now and I have done a lot of cool projects and met a lot of great people. Though the best of all I have learned a lot. The first thing I worked on when I started was a simple piece of wheat or so I thought was simple. Who knew wheat was so intricate or was going to be so scrutinized to the nth detail. The projects when I took it on sounded simple create, 3d wheat so that in can be composited in a web site for post. What made the project harder than what I initially that I had to do it in 3D Studio Max. Now at the School of Visuals Arts we are taught one main program and that is Maya we never came close to even touching 3DSMax. To say it was different was an understatement though I pulled through and with my basic knowledge of Max I managed to create a pretty good looking piece of wheat. You can see the final product here at http://www.postcereals.com/shreddedwheat/index.html.
After the Post Shredded Wheat project I called into Jayme’s (President of Visual Goodness) office in order to discuss the next project. I was told Steve and I were going to be creating a series of banners For Samsung advertising there new high resistant flash cards. Samsung wanted three banners in all showing the strength of their new flash cards. The first banner involved a Godzilla creature stepping on a flash card, the second had a bottle of champagne explode all over it, and lastly the client wanted to have a realistic fish land on a card. Steve assigned me the responsibility of Creating, Modeling and Texturing a realistic Rainbow Trout.
My job over the next few days was to find as much reference as humanly possible and then to start modeling of the fish. Luckily after the first project I had convinced the company to let me use their only copy of Maya telling them that my work would get done quicker. So I started off with the base mesh which got done surprisingly quickly. Then I threw the fish in to Zbrush to take it over the edge and make it as realistic as possible. The art direction on the piece was probably the hardest I have had in a long time I didn’t know at the time that Jayme was a fisherman and knew everything about Rainbow Trout so it was a hard sell. I learned the most on this project when I got to texturing. Now school didn’t teach us that much about texturing so it was a good thing to learn I figured out how to do the entire texturing pipeline with Max, Zbrush, and Photoshop. Things like combining displacement maps and normal maps are second nature to me now.
here are some other Projects I have been working on: