Personal Review of the Second Year

So draws the end of my second year at university. I have to say it has definitely been a more hectic year than the first. To begin with, I’ll talk about how I wanted to follow this year through from the beginning.

Ever since the end of the first year, I always felt that I needed to pick up the pace with digital painting. Throughout this year I decided that I will try to do as much finals as I can in digital form.

I also decided that I would try to add a little more focus onto my 3D work as in the previous year I didn’t place as much focus onto my game production work.

However because of my focus on trying to improve my digital painting along with my colouring skills, I wasn’t able to produce as much work as I had hoped as I had spent far too long on my finals, trying to learn and familiarise myself the tools.

I learnt a lot from digital painting this year through my finals and discussions with my friends and Feng Zhu video tutorials.

My Bradgate finals from Year one (top) and Year 2 (bottom). I think I've improved slightly. and have a much better understanding of digital painting in general.

The biggest hardship of this year was the group project. I never expected life to get so hard during that time. I found that in 3D I made a habit of reflecting upon my previous work to see how I could have made it better. With my mistakes in mind I experimented other ways in which I would be able to better my work. The 3D project had me learn a lot more as well however, mostly through myself other than my group members.

In general, I feel I have improved much more and have learnt many things as well as teach a few things to some of my fellow course mates as well!

My scene from my group project work.

Unfortunately because most of my time was tied up with the group project, I neglected the Visual Design course for a very long time and feel that I haven’t made as much progress with my drawings skills and digital skills as I wanted to. I plan to work extra hard on my visual design skills (whilst not neglecting on my game production skills) during the summer break.

One of my friends on the course is planning on making a personal group project for a group of us over the summer and if it goes underway, I will love to work on that before the start of the new year to keep us occupied with productivity.

During this year I think I have chosen a specific path I want to take further; which is environments. I will continue to develop other areas such as vehicles and characters, but I tend to do a little better with the environments. I won’t set this for myself onto stone though

A lot of the work I've done this year for visual design has been very experimental with digital painting as well as just in general. I feel that through these experiments I have been able to broaden my creativity as well as my tehcnical skills as an artist.

Here is an example of me experimenting with my final pieces. I was playing around with textures with these two and how it could affect the mood and feel of the paintings.

This year has been a very bumpy ride. It was full of emotions, hardships and new experiences. I can definitely say that I’ve learnt a lot of important things that are invaluable to maturing as an artist and as a responsible human being.