Today’s post is a little anemic but I’m going to cheat by updating it over the next day or two to flesh it out.

I want to give myself as much information as I can before diving into painting. Since I don’t have a metallic clock-faced owl on hand I made a little maquette. It isn’t the most refined thing around, but it has the basic shapes I want.

I spray painted the owl gold to get the metallic look I wanted, set up a simple lighting rig and took a batch of shots. I think it will help a lot.

Jesus, this computer is slow!!! It drives me nuts! It took forever to open this Live writer, geez!!

Anyway, my goal for the week 2 was to finish all modeling. I’ve finished an egg and a sprout last week so I had to finish what’s left… an embryo. I modeled other two in the form of polygon so I did the same to this guy also. Its shape is very primitive so I didn’t have to worry too much about details, which was good. My method was to model the half of it and then mirror it to make a whole body. However, for some reason, Mirror Mesh tool didn’t wanna do what I want it to do so, I had to use the other method to combine the two half objects. It took me a while to make it work but good thing is that this is a modeling project, not an animation so I didn’t have to worry about how the character would move, etc. Now I’ll have to move on and start making a lot of texture for each model this coming week.

Here we go with the next adventurous installment of:

Well here we are in week 2 already. I finished up my drawings and scanned them into the computer.

First thing I had to do was combine my drawings into one image then I started moving things around until I got the layout to be more or less in the right place. I put it into the playing card template to make sure everything would fit in this small format size. The text is just a place holder for now, still not sure what I want it to say exactly.

I threw in the blue to help give me the feel of the overall color. I really want to try and limit my color palette to a maximum of 4 colors in order to really get the feel of a screen printed poster.

The pictures below are just detail shots of the Space Girl and the alien. My next step is to take this into illustrator and start the final render.  See you next week ….or should I say IN THE FUTURE!

REFERENCE

This week was all about gathering reference. I thought I’d share some.

This painting, “The Man with the Golden Helmet” has to be listed as my first bit of reference. It was very much on my mind as I thought of the story and (perhaps strangely) influenced the creation of the Clock-Owl idea. When I paint the portrait of the adult version of our protagonist I’ll be trying to get as close to this feeling as my limited skills allow.

The spread below is a collection of assorted reference. A friend and her daughter kindly agreed to pose for the figures. On the far right is a quick chop together of their pictures to give me something to look at as I start my drawings.

Theme : future

Tools used : color pencils, photoshop, Maya

It’s a difficult theme. Future. Many things can be considered to be some type of “future”. I just didn’t want to make something look like right out of sci-fi movies. Instead, I wanted to create something don’t look so futuristic. So I came up with something primitive but also symbolize some type of future  such as embryo, egg, sprout, etc…

Why? Well, Whitney Houston said that the children are our future, didn’t she?

I also wanted to keep things simple. “Keep it simple” will be applied to all my R-WAC work.

Anyway, first I sketched out some image I came up with on a paper. Then I use Maya to make it in 3D. I just chose to use Maya as a main tool for this theme. (I might not use any 3D application for the next project/theme).

I modeled the egg which will be the center of the image first so that I can create everything else from there. I think that the most difficult part of this project will be 2 things. Texturing and lighting, 2 things I’m not really good at. It’ll be bit of a challenge but I hope I can pull it off, somehow.

Hello, Wurm here.   Early on in our process of creating this idea of doing art pieces for a collection, I had decided that I wanted to get better at sculpting.  So that has become my goal with this project, increase my skill level at creating finalized sculptures.  In the past with the weekly art challuunges I had done a few sculptures that looked pretty good in photos.  However, if you were to check out the back sides of them they resembled a construction site that had been attached by blood thirsty vandals with copper shovels and Zotz® candy wrappers.  All I am saying is that I aim to change this.  That’s all.

So here we go with week one: the playing card for this month is the number “2”.  I have the “hearts” suite so that’s pretty sweet.  I may or may not incorporate these into the concepts as i go, but for now – onto this month’s concept:

I sincerely feel that in the future, there will be no procrastination.  The thought of putting things off until the next day will be a thing of the past.  Everyone will do exactly what they need to do when they should and the world will live in “the now”.  There will be no more famine and all the voices of the humans on earth will sing as one gigantic booming voice… it will be like Barry White and Shadow Stevens had an interspecies love child with a Saint Bernard.  Now that would be a tremendous voice!

Wait, where was I? 

Never mind, I’ll finish that story another time… So my concept is very loose right now.   I am going for an “anti-procrastination” robot sculpture that will be responsible for the end of procrastination and ultimately creating the one-world Saint-Barry-Shadow voice we will all use in unison.  Here are some pics of my progress thus far…

The first photo above are some prelim sketches to flush out some pencil frustrations before beginning to sculpt.  I’m new to super sculpey but it seems to be a nice medium for sculpting anti-procrastination robots.

Here we have some early concepts of the front and side of the head and face. You can just smell the scent of “gotta-get-it-done-right-now-and-not-wait-until-tomorrow” as the piece begins to take shape in these early stages.