2017 Update 2 - Oatley Academy Mentorship

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

New Portfolio Pages

I'm currently keeping my head down working on a portfolio for this year's CTN Animation Expo, which is happening at the end of November. However, the deadline to submit a 12-page portfolio for their specialized recruitment event was today, and I'm happy to say that I just submitted.

After two years of taking classes and going to countless workshops and art events, it's a bit surreal to be finally submitting my portfolio to actual animation and game studios. No matter what happens, I'm proud of the work that I've done and the skill level I've achieved, and I'm excited for whatever the future holds.

Here's some of the recently completed portfolio pages I made to go along from my work from Jose Lopez's Character Design class. You can view my entire portfolio by clicking on the tab above, or just clicking here.

I had a lot of fun with these if you can't tell! Props = good times. Although I am officially over attempting to do solid linework using a tablet... yeesh... whose idea was that.

© Gina Florio 2014

Character Design with Jose Lopez

My latest class at the Concept Design Academy is Character Design with Jose Lopez. We're about halfway through the class.

I've been working towards taking this class for two years. When I first got interested in concept art, I wanted to jump immediately to character design, but I knew I wasn't ready - I had to study the fundamentals first. This is a complete list of the classes I have taken so far, in this order:

VisCom 1

Perspective

Landscape Painting

Analytical Figure Drawing

Intro to Digital Painting

Intro to Story Development

Figure Invention for Animation

I took Story Dev and Fig Invention during the spring semester because I was thinking about pursuing a track as a storyboard artist. I subsequently realized that I did not enjoy storyboarding at all - but I don't regret taking those classes. 

Even if most of these classes weren't directly related to character design, I've learned something and made artistic progress in every single one. I don't miss struggling with oil paints in the hot sun. But the landscape painting class made me a much better artist because I learned to pay attention to the big picture, the broader statement of the image. I don't miss calculating precisely at which angle a generic box is casting a shadow. But learning perspective paid off greatly during my character design homework this week when I had to do turnarounds and calculate precisely where my characters' feet would be on the ground.

I would have taken more classes before character design if I had had more time - I particularly would have loved to take Animal Anatomy, and the more advanced Head / Figure Drawing class. But I've been studying those things on my own on the side as I go along. And I knew my fundamental drawing skills were getting strong, but I was sorely lacking in my design skills. I felt ready to tackle a design course.

For Character Design, we were supposed to come up with a story (or choose a classic fairytale) and do designs for 4 characters of our choosing - a hero, a love interest, a villain, and a sidekick. We started off with LOTS of thumbnails, and finally it came down to doing a final design and turnaround for 2 of them.

My characters are Riva, a scrappy cartographer's daughter, Altus, the forest prince, Unnamed Villain, the mayor of Riva's town, and Altus's steed, a creature of the forest.

I did turnarounds for Riva and Altus. I finalized their designs more during the turnaround phase, after receiving a critique on the final design from the teacher.

 

Overall I have been really, really enjoying this class and I feel like I've learned so much. I already cringe when looking back at my earlier design process!

© Gina Florio 2014

The Reward

I know I said I'll post a big sketchdump... and I will. But for the moment I'm back to work full time and my weekends are crazy which leaves very little time for blogging (and artmaking :( but I'm still doing my best to make time).

In the meantime, one thing I CAN do during lunch at work is write short blog posts about awesome things I find on the internet. And this is the awesomeist thing I have seen in a while. It's an 8-minute thesis film called "The Reward", co-directed by Mikkel Mainz Elkjær and Kenneth Ladekjær at The Animation Workshop in Denmark, and that's all I'll say. Don't think. Just watch.

A bunch of the other art blogs that I follow have already posted about this (Muddy Colors - Lines and Colors - Cartoon Brew), which leaves me very little to do except have my voice join the chorus of praises for this great little film. I love the fact that it's wordless and thus able to be universally understood, I love the tongue-in-cheek tone (which is established within the first 60 seconds), and I love the "moral of the story" which is something I try to remind myself every day: The journey is its own reward. This relates to art education as well as life itself... the process of becoming a better, more complete artist/person is the true reward, as opposed to any particular goal or destination that you have in mind (making x amount of money... becoming famous... winning a certain art contest... getting a certain job). At the end of the day, outside forces are going to influence your life and either allow you to or prevent you from achieving those things... but only YOU have the power to determine your own attitude about how you live the life you have. If, despite everything, you work hard to improve yourself as an artist or grow as a person, then you've already succeeded. Put more succinctly: "Success is not a place at which one arrives but rather the spirit with which one undertakes and continues the journey.” - Alex Noble.

 Some extra links:

Website for The Reward, with LOTS of great concept art etc. (some posted below)
The Animation Workshop website.
Other Animation Workshop shorts.
Mikkel Mainz Elkjær's blog.
Kenneth Ladekjær's blog, on which he reveals they're making an indie game based on the film!

Here's a making-of video:

After watching this, two thoughts - (a) JEEEEEZ do I have a long way to go/a lot to learn about, (b) another great example of 2D animation meeting 3D technology!! I'll admit, as passionate as I am about animation, I'm still so uneducated about the way it works that I had no idea that this film used 3D modeling and animation.

Some backgrounds, character turnarounds and color scripts from the film's website:

Noah Bradley

Like many other people on the internet, I spend too much time on Reddit. I've had this AMA with concept artist/illustrator Noah Bradley bookmarked for some time and today I finally got the time to read it. Some of Noah's art:

The AMA is great - there's lots of good advice in there to start, but it ultimately led me to his blog and finally to this post called Stop Whining, Start Working. (It's on a similar subject as my earlier post about Letting the Learning Get in the Way.) I'll repeat his text here, as I felt like it was speaking straight to me:

I hear it all the time:

Am I talented enough? How much should I draw? Am I studying right? What’s the best way to use XYZ book? Art school or no art school? Do I need a degree? How will I know when I’m professional? What should I draw? Should I do more studies or finished work? What are the best materials? What kind of paint should I use? What pencil should I use? Are pencils or pens better to draw with? Should I draw big or small? Is it bad to draw from photos? Should I paint digitally or traditionally? Am I too old to start learning? Is Photoshop or Painter better? What’s the best way to hold a pencil? Where should I find inspiration? What do I do if I’m not inspired? How do I get through “artist’s block”? How long will it take to be a professional? Why does it feel like I’m not improving? Should I get a Moleskine? Is art dead? What is art? How do I do backgrounds? What are the best tutorials? What resolution should I work at? How do I come up with good ideas? What do I do if I stop enjoying art?

Well, I have the answer to all of your questions: it doesn’t matter. Really. It doesn’t. These questions are excuses, plain and simple. They are used by people who aren’t drawing or painting that want to get wrapped up in petty minutiae at the expense of their own work.

The fact is that if you want to make art, then you need to make art. I could answer every single question on this list and it wouldn’t make you the slightest bit better at drawing.

Now, I should qualify these statements before people start chucking rocks: these are mostly valid questions, with equally valid answers. They’re worth discussing at times, and are things that you’ll eventually figure out. But by and large, you’ll figure them all out for yourself by working. Notice a pattern here? Don’t be afraid to ask questions and research things, but be sure you’re not doing it at the expense of actually learning things.

So shut up, stop whining, and get to work.

Thanks Noah. And now I'm going to get off the internet and do some drawing. :)