My Personal Mandalas

For the Mandala Project, we were tasked to create a mandala using Illustrator which will later be engraved onto a material of our choosing, the goal for this project was to deepen our understanding of Adobe Illustrator. Firstly, we created templates that mirrored each section based on how much “slices” you wish to have on it, then we picked our templates and created our designs, we also had to create a colored version. The black and white version would eventually be engraved, with the colored version being printed on vinyl.

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What were my reactions upon seeing the laser engraved mandala? How well did your physical analog artwork match your imagined digital artwork? Thinking about how simple my mandala is, I was genuinely surprised how much detail was translated from the digital copy and into the engraved version. The black sections engraved on the shiny metallic texture brought out the finer details and enhanced the design. The engraved version of the artwork even better than I imagined how it would look and has more detail than the digital artwork.

I chose metallic plastic for my mandala because I thought it would be the best material for the style I was going for with my design. My design is based on 60s retro-futuristic Spy tech, so the type of material I chose for my mandala fit my design very well and looked very clean.

While this isn’t necessarily different to the BW Mandala in terms of design, I decided to color my mandala based off of the Steam achievement icons you can obtain from the game. The icons typically used three different solid colors (Grey, Orange, and Off-white). With grey being the background, off-white being a secondary background, and orange being miscellaneous, I emulated that style on my mandala to the best of my ability. It isn’t one-to-one to how the colors were arranged on the achievement icons, but still used the exact colors and still is faithful to the source material.

When I was first designing the first draft of my mandala, my original plan was to color it similar to the original concept art made for Team Fortress 2, which used Americana pastel artwork. I had to scrap the idea unfortunately due to time and the design being reworked. However, I’m glad that I decided to use the achievement colorway because it fit more in line with the general design I was going for, it also made for a more sleek design that fit better on a smaller canvas.

The Mandala Build Video was the next part of this project right after making the mandala, a “Behind the Scenes” video. I made this video using Adobe After Effects and a bunch of videos of the layers of the mandala stitched together.

Art Curation for Personal Museum

For our Art Curation Project, we were tasked during our time at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Arts to take photos that caught our attention, which we would be later tasked to write our thoughts down. If I had to choice to pick three paintings from the museum and place them into a personal art museum, these would be my picks because they resemble a type of art I resonate with. A type of art that you wouldn’t really see anymore, and made with such care and dedication that it was noticeable. These pieces align to what I would personally make, and would be great additions to my museum.

My reasoning for why I chose which pieces go into my personal fictional museum comes down to my own personal art style and taste. For the most part I’m interested in 60s, 70s, and 80s Americana designs, so I gravitated towards that art-style when I visited the museum. I’m also picky with what I consider good or not, I will most likely not like an art piece if the piece itself didn’t require much effort to be made, I prioritize effort over a piece being abstract. Overall, my reasoning for my choices comes down to my personal preference and the effort that went into a piece.

Skull Render

Head Render

Weapon Render

Character Render + Final Product

This is the design I used for my Character Model Project in Animation, which was based off of an older design I used last year for my Puppet. Generally I’m very unhappy with how it turned out, so this project was sort of a “redemption” to it. I was already well accustomed to modeling in Blender and I got the hang of modeling in Maya, however was my first time making a full character model, it isn’t perfect but I thought the modeling portion went pretty well. Considering the other sculpts I’ve made above this section, sculpting using Zbrush isn’t really my thing, but the advantage I had over modeling in this section was that I could add more detail to the mode (i.e. dents, the shape of the face, etc) than I could have if I just modeled it. Lastly, this project made me realize how much I love using Substance 3D painter, the program is streamlined and makes the process of creating textures and UV wrapping it onto the model so much easier. Before I used Substance when I was making models, I would have to manually make the textures myself and wrap it, Substances completely bypasses that by allowing you to make your own textures in the program and apply it onto the model to your liking. In conclusion, I thought this project was extremely fulfilling because it taught me a multitude of techniques I can use to create things for 3D Software like Blender and Maya, and it made realize the potential all of these programs have for my art. I’m very excited to see how I use this technology for future projects.