FMP Part 1 : Phantom Blood
Huh so its finally here....
Well things must end and my time at DMU is running out (although I wished I had another year) so here it is the big one. The one that should be (please be) my magnum opus of my 3 years at game art. We have gone from wanting to be a concept artist to an illustrator to an animator and then a 3d character artist and now, drum roll please back to concepting. After working with style matrix I found that maybe I just don’t want to work as a 3d artist from 9-5. Over the 3 years although I appreciate the 3d learning when I think about the thing which I spend most of my time doing and suffering from but keep coming back to, it’s been 2d art all this time. so for my FMP I have proposed to do a project which will lay the foundation for a transfer into 2d concepting. although I am scared and understand how this will limit my employment options I think I would be much happier suffering being “Funemployed” than doing a job which I just unfortunately don’t think I will enjoy.
It was fun character art and I learned a lot and I now appreciate and value so much how painful the 3d character art workflow can be. but I guess I just don’t get as much gratification from it as much as ol’ 2d.
Anyway about FMP, so the project I have chosen to do is a concepting brief concepting characters from various factions of a hypothetic sci-fi RPG game. Similar to games that Bioware produce. The stretch goal is to allow for more world building and concept weapons, vehicles and props for this project.
The world as simple as I can describe it is a post-apocalyptic world however I would rather x world have the feel of a spaghetti western and shy away from the mad max sign wearing leather trope you see in many post-apocalyptic texts.
Basically something like this - Nice muted colours
I have planned to do 12 characters, one a week to allow me enough time to print out a book that will collate all of my artwork and workflow. The main goal of this FMP is to learn and grow rather than primarily produce a product that will get me a job straight out of uni. However, this does not mean I won’t try to produce a quality product.
To organise and stay on top of my project I have made an Excel document planning out my project week by week and having a smaller time table attempting to manage the day to day side of things. After this week it is clear that I may have planned more than I can possibly achieve within the week. As a result of this I have re-written my table so now instead of right of the bat producing a character per week I have given myself a 3-week taster period to produce 3 dichotomous characters within said time frame and decided to concept a bunch of say less important characters within a 1-3-day time frame which I hear is industry Standard. This has been decided as a result of allowing me time to get used to a workflow whilst allowing me to design 3 characters that aren’t so different than say jumping one week to another having to make a completely fresh character and the design choices said characters bring.
Anyway the slide show below will contain screenshots of my work so far. This week and the next 2 weeks will be attempting to concept 3 characters belonging to a raider esc faction.
Next week I will go into more detail about the world and the overall project I am doing but for now here is just a general catch up post to get things out in the open.
