The Reflections Unit was a chance for us to learn new skills and expand our talents in what we want to do and make! Some things we learned in our classes were how to make a Mandala, how to use After Effects effectively and professionally, and how to make music and edit said music to make it sound beautiful! I learned a lot about myself in this Unit, in Animation especially. I learned one thing about myself through my “essence objects” that we were asked to figure out during English. One of which was patience, one thing that animators and artists like myself have to have for our work is patience, not many people possess that skill, having patience is super important in order to complete projects, as animations can take days, or weeks to make a simple 15-second film. I absolutely loved every part of my character modeling, it was super fun seeing my character that I made on paper come to life right in front of my eyes as a 3D object. Overall this was a very fun unit and I enjoyed it very much.
Mandala Project
This project was all about us making what’s called a Mandala using Illustrator. We created 6 different templates and then we got to choose which one we wanted to use. I decided to do a 16-sectioned Mandala. Then we drew on a specific triangle that was our drawing layer. We made a bunch of patterns and drew so many creative designs. Once we finished we had to name it and make a video presentation of us putting it together! I’ll let you look at the rest
Title: The Queen’s Orders
Paragraph 1: My main inspiration for this project was making a sense of royalty, but also a sense of order, but at the same time, complete destruction and disorder, this relates to me solely on how I feel at home sometimes. I think I grew from this project based on knowing how to make specific strokes and knowing how I wanted them to look. A struggle however is the fact that I couldn’t get the filling to look right since the colors wouldn’t fill in a specific section I wanted every time.
Paragraph 2: If I were to change this project I would simply add more detail and try to make the viewer understand what I was trying to go for a little more. I am most proud of the idea and how this mandala just represents me in a small way. In the future, I will try and make a Mandala that has a deeper meaning behind it, trying to get the viewer to fully take in the art. The project makes me appreciate art in ways that creating art can be tricky, especially trying to come up with a fresh idea, so I hold lots of respect for those who do this for a living, that must be crazy.
My College Personal Essay
Making our College Personal Essay was more fun than I thought it would be. I always disliked essays, but since this one was about me and my story I made myself have fun with it, and I did! My goal was to take a traumatic or difficult experience from my past and relate it to what I want to be in the future, in this case, an animator. I told my very deep and true story and how it corresponded to it. I remember lots of people in my class didn’t want to get that deep if they had the same prompt as I did but I went all out, you may have a listen if you wish.
Motion Graphics
This project was a long but also kind of fun challenge to help us learn After Effects more and more! One thing I loved about this project was learning how to use the application more since I find After Effects super fun to learn and use. I like many of these videos and I can’t wait for you to see them!
Animation Projects!
Animation without a doubt has been the most fun I have had throughout this whole year so far. Compared to last year, learning 3D modeling has been such a great experience; it’s crazy how it can all start with just one simple shape, and then you can edit it and make almost anything you can imagine! I have done many great things this year and I can’t wait to do even more in the future.
The skull project was one of our first projects, it seems crazy that this whole started with just one sphere! Now look at it, it looks like a decent skull, it was hard to learn Zbrush at first, which is the application we used to detail our models. After some trial and error, however, I managed to figure it out! I am very proud of this project
This was another start-from-scratch project using Zbrush, except this time we had to make a fully detailed head! I had lots of fun with this and tried to make it as silly as possible. I was very proud of the hair and neck specifically because of how good I think it look! This is most certainly a project I will remember for some time.
This was a model we made in Maya, a 3D modeling application that we used to start almost every single one of our projects. It was very hard for me to get the hang of at first but over time I finally understood how to use the application effectively. I thought the table scene was fun, not one of my favorites but a project that started it all since this was the first thing we made after all. I loved making it anyway and I can’t wait to make even more!
This was one project that I found pretty fun. We were asked to find an image online and create the model ourselves but put our little twist on it. I decided to make this laser sword here, it looks much better when it’s colored I promise! I learned the required patience for something like this since it took me a long time to figure out the proper way to model it. This was a great project and it makes me just want to create more!
This was the Character project, this is the project I have been looking forward to since last year! The process was incredible. We started it all from the Maya application, and we took an image of our character/drawing and imported it into Maya for reference. We then used very basic shapes to build up the character. Once we did that we imported it into Zbrush where we did all the details and smoothed everything out. Finally, we put it into Substance Painter and gave the character all the colors. I loved this project with all of my heart and I had so much fun making it, I have no complaints, other than the fact that I wish I used a different reference image.