Over
the summer, I was off of work for 4 weeks between July and August. That
hiatus happened to line up perfectly with ‘First Flight,’ a 5-week
online visual development workshop being run by the Oatley Academy of Visual Storytelling. I’d done some learn-at-your-own-pace Magic Box
lessons over the years, but hadn’t taken an actual course with OA yet; I
decided to take the plunge and, after much deliberation and thought,
added on a personal character design mentorship with Chris Oatley himself, to be conducted alongside the First Flight workshop lessons.
The
workshop was essentially a self-directed portfolio development course,
giving guidelines, tips and prompts to develop and create the art for
your own story as the basis of an animation or gaming concept art
portfolio. The addition of the mentorship meant that once a week Chris
would be checking in with me (along with 15 others) to see how the work
for my portfolio was coming along and give feedback... so I had better do it!
I
spent much of the first two weeks brainstorming, writing and doing
research for my story. The workshop advised taking a story already in
existence from fairytales or myths and altering it somehow - a common
practice was to change the location and culture of the story. Following
this directive, the Greek goddess Artemis became Pinga, a teenage
huntress in the Inuit culture (specifically Kalaallit) in Greenland in
the 1800s.
When
the course and mentorship ended in mid-August and I returned to work, I
had not much completed besides a ton of sketches. I dreaded the end
of my hiatus - in the past, I hadn’t had much luck carrying my artistic
momentum back into full-time job mode. But the fact that I had done so
much writing about Pinga meant that her story stuck in my head. She had
become somewhat actualized to me, as if I knew her personally, and every
day I didn’t spend time drawing more of her story, I could almost feel
her rapping her knuckles on the inside of my brain, yelling that I
hadn’t finished her yet and I needed to get back to work. (Since the major feedback from CTN 2014 had been that I didn't seem to really care about my characters or story in my portfolio, I considered this a very good thing.) I dutifully
found time to compile my best sketches into a series of pages and got to
work finalizing the work & fleshing out the story visually. Here’s
what I came up with!
When
I finalized the last page, I felt tired but happy - my home life had
consisted of nothing but Photoshop for the two weeks prior, but I also
felt (and still feel) that this was absolutely the best work I could do
at this point in time, which meant that every other consequence was out
of my control. I could now, for the first time in a few years, relax in
the knowledge that I’d officially given it the old college try.
I
completed the majority of the work on October 26th, just in time to
submit for professional recruiting for CTNx 2017. More on that in the
next post...
© Gina Florio 2017
