5.09.2020
This was the perfect exercise to get me out of my creative rut.


During this time, it's especially hard to come up with new ideas and will power to get new projects flowing. Without people and places to see, it's extremely hard to get inspiration from anything besides what you have at home. It's been almost seven weeks since stay in place (maybe?), and I've barely created anything for my portfolio. Did I want to create something in 3D? 2D? What kind of look did I want to go for? Realistic? Cartoony? Needless to say, this exercise covered all my bases.


THE END RESULT.

  • What I ended up creating was a 180 turn around with 24 frames going from left to right in differently stylized images/renders for each angle. This exercise definitely helped me discover different art styles, as well as challenging me to go outside of my comfort zone.

THE PROCESS:

CHOOSING A FOCAL POINT.

  • For this project, I wanted my focal point to be something simple. I didn't want to have a large scene that would require too much work, and I wanted something that wouldn't take a lot of effort for me to set up. One of things I enjoy doing is going onto 3D asset websites and browsing through the different assets and models that people have up there so that I can draw some inspiration from what's already up online. I found an interior scene with the KAWS model featured in it, and I immediately knew that I wanted to use the figure as my focal point: it was recognizable and fit into the "hype beast" concept that I was thinking of.

THE BASE.

  • I've been really into cinemagraphs lately, so I knew I wanted to go down that route again. For those of you who don't know, cinemagraphs are basically images where a majority of the image is still, but one part of the image is animated. It's a beautiful way of making an image come alive. I knew that I wanted to have some movement in the frame, but I didn't want to have to animate and rig the model because I knew that if I did that, I would never finish the project because I'd get frustrated. The easiest thing to do was to put the model on a turn table and have it rotating from left to right for subtle animation. Now, I had a 180 turn around with 24 frames going from left to right for at least one second of animation.

THE LOOK.

  • This part was quite difficult. Initially, I was just going to make a realistic looking turn around with proper shaders and work at just making it look as realistic as possible. But that was boring, and I knew that I wouldn't be happy with the outcome. Then I thought about practicing just doing hand drawn animation to give a slight jittery effect. As I was brainstorming more of what I wanted to do, I thought, "Why not do everything?" There were 24 frames of images that I could use to create anything I wanted.

THE MEDIUMS.

  • I'm fortunate to be able to do both 2D and 3D art, so I wanted to make sure I used both to be able to produce different mediums for this project. I used primarily Photoshop and Blender to get the visuals that I wanted. I used Blender to create the 3D visuals like the metal, fur, glass, etc., and I used Photoshop to create the drawn out ones. 
  • I thought a lot about every day materials or materials that would look extravagant when used as an entirety, such as all fur or all glass. From there, I was able to start pumping out images pretty quickly.

All in all, I felt like this exercise was so great for getting myself flowing with creativity again because it really pushed me to think about what I wanted to do, and I was able to let myself do whatever I wanted and really test out what I could do. If you're also feeling like you're unable to create anything, maybe this could be an exercise for you, too? I know that not everyone has access to 3D programs, but maybe I'm sure the outcome would look great drawing the same image over and over again in different ways.

If you wanna know more about what I did in detail or how I did any of the images, feel free to message me on Instagram, and I'll help you out!

Much love,
Diane

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