The "Bad Sketch" series: #1/1000

As I mentioned in my previous post, one of my goals this summer is to produce a large number of sketches, without worrying about the end results. Some will be finished-ish, others will be very rough and incomplete. Not worrying about how "good" they may be frees me up to experiment, stay loose, learn a broader variety of techniques, be creative, and most importantly, have fun. So without further ado, here's a couple screenies from my first sketch in Z. Based on the scary barnacles in the half-life video games.

This last image is called an "alpha" and it's used to pull out surface detail on sculptures. I drew it in PS to make the little barnacle shells on the big barnacle. You'll notice that white gets pulled out, and black is left at the same depth.

Later,
Stuart

June Update

Really can't believe it's been so long since I've updated my blog. Time just screams by. I've been keeping busy, but sometimes it's difficult to see what I've accomplished. I guess that's what blogs are for. So here we go: the past month in a nutshell.

I've been working on several simple line illustrations for Toronto Notes, which I may be able to share in the future, but not quite yet. Although classes for Business Practice and Research Methods are finished, there are a couple projects just wrapping up this week. My MRP proposal is now finished, and I created a bunch of business docs too. So, mostly written stuff and very little imagery, although here's my new(er) logo:

and the tag line I'm going to go with for the time being is "Animating the Components of Life". I also registered Biocinematics as a business in Ontario, so that was kind of exciting.

I'm working on a PPE PSA Poster with Olivia. This is one of the sketches I did for that:

I finished ZBrush 3 Essentials and am getting close to finishing ZBrush 4 Essentials over at Lynda.com. My goodness, ZBrush is the most unintuitive, hardest to learn program I've ever encountered. Seriously, even the instructors keep saying "I know this doesn't really make much sense, but you'll get used to it." For everything! And to make matters worse, the program changes so much from version to version. I have 4R2 (version 4 release 2) so after the frantic googling that accompanied the ZBrush 3 course, I thought the version 4 training would make more sense. Not so, the buttons and options just keep disappearing and moving around the interface. Very hard to find stuff. And several of the brushes are gone! At least to my eye they're gone. What kind of developer removes brushes? I suppose in the long run it's a good idea to not let the program stagnate and bloat up, but by the SAME token, why are meshes still called tools because the program was first developed to paint in 2D using 3D objects? /Rant. In the end, it's really rather fun, which is why I've done more tutorials on ZBrush than on Photoshop or Unity. My aim is to get past the bewilderment phase of learning ZBrush ASAP so I can start generating sketches.

Which brings me to my next goal. I've been wanting to get in the habit of doing many smallish sketches in PS and ZBrush, and that's slowly starting to happen. That means that I should have lots of crummy artwork to post in the next weeks. One of my professors' professors said something along the lines of this "You need to shake a thousand bad drawings out of your sleeves before the good ones start coming out" and there was another quote about making lots and lots of bad art and then you'll start getting good. But I can't remember who said it or enough of the words to google it, so oh well.

I also read a whole textbook on fiber optics. And bought some juggling clubs so I would have an excuse to maybe go outside and get a bit of exercise. So there you go, I guess June did have rather a lot going on.

And finally, cause you made it all the way to the bottom, I can share my updated journal cover that I've submitted to the AMI 2012 salon. Thanks for reading.

Later,
Stuart