Block 1

80%
Traditional art was nothing new to me, but how I loved every second of it. Through our 7 lessons I have found my weaknesses in defining a confident core shadow on surfaces and drawing confident cast shadows. I loved going to the New Walk museum to draw skulls and look at skeletons and fossils. For future lessons I am really excited to work on more complex studies with better use of perspective and working on my rendering to suggest more interesting texture. I would also like to practice using volumetric boxes more often.

I believe my approach to traditional art has been successful throughout the term as I have dedicated every Tuesday to work on my studies. I do think it would be nice to produce more traditional artwork throughout the week along with the dedicated Tuesdays so that I can actively learn to visualize and draw from imagination with more confidence. I should use the drawing centre to light my own setups as-well as draw more things around me. I know I have always been intimidated to draw outside environments because of the immense detail as well as the public always keeping my mind out of the drawing mindset but as we reach closer to environment studies and projects centred around settings and environments, I believe practicing this would be very helpful.

80%
We only have one lesson in the week dedicated to digital art, but unlike traditional art where I reserve every Tuesday to complete my traditional work, I always ended up focusing on game production on Mondays since it is right after our digital class. In future projects I want to reserve more time for digital art so that I don't fall behind on the work. Although this brief was relatively simple and I completed it without much trouble, I don't believe my outcomes are as successful as I would have hoped them to be. I didn't think about how I could incorporate narrative within them so it is quite dull to look at and I found adding colour to my greyscale paintings an odd process. Being expected to work in greyscale for the entirety of these 7 weeks across all three subjects was kind of exhausting in my opinion, but perhaps I just haven't learned to enjoy gradient maps yet. 

70%
Game production was an incredible new learning experience. I was really intimidated by the 3D software at the beginning of this block, but most of all, I was so worried I would not enjoy it the way I was hoping to. To my relief, however, 3D was such a pleasure to learn. I had the motivation to create my own treasure chest model and I tried my hand at using splines and alphas. This allowed me to apply the learned material independently, boosting my confidence in 3D modelling and enabling a more personal and satisfying project outcome. I am very happy with the progress I have made in this block and hope to continue learning as much as I have in these 7 weeks for the rest of the year.

Apart from learning the software, I noticed slow progress happening once I reached the hand painted textures. I hadn't really planned what colours I wanted to use for my treasure chest in detail so I was stuck for a very long time trying to figure it out, going back and forth, not making much progress despite spending hours on them. I would make sure to think about how I want my assets to look in colour and not just in black and white for future.

Unreal Editor also still seems incredibly foreign and new to me since we only used it at the very end to light our models and it wasn't taught at the pace 3ds Max was.