At the very beginning of the year in Digital Design and Animation I (Game Design) we began to do weekly sketches to improve our drawing skills. This was fun and I enjoy doing pencil sketches so these assignments were very helpful. We began first quarter with human anatomy, we worked on body parts such as hands, legs, arms and facial features such as ears, eyes and noses. Each week we would have a different area in which we would have lots of practice drawings and then one final product. At the end of the first quarter we had to draw an entire person and put together all of the skills we had learned throughout the quarter. Then second quarter we began working on drawing spaceships and vehicles. When we had done all of those drawing we then did a "Master Spaceship" sketch, that compiled all of the work we had done on drawing mechanical features. To continue the pattern of living (first quarter), non-living (second quarter) and now living (third quarter) we are doing monster/creature sketches. I feel that my drawing skills have really improved and that I have benefitted from learning these techniques. I put lots of the shading techniques I learned in the human drawing segment into this most recent "Power Monster" sketch. There are similarities in between the creatures and the human drawings. They both require more round and softer edges where the spaceships have sharp edges and stronger lines. Surprisingly, there were also some similarities in between the spaceships and creatures such as some of the shading and way the wings on both had to be put into perspective. These techniques will come in handy in the future and I am excited to see what we will be drawing fourth quarter.
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In my Digital Design and Animation class we have begun discussing different types animation, and their histories. Animation and movies interest me and I have even used some of the animation types we have gone over in class. We are currently working in Adobe Illustrator and doing "traditional" animation. We were assigned to make an animation of a ball that lasted 10 seconds. To do this, we had to make 120 images because we had 1 drawing every 2 frames and we needed roughly 24 frames per second to be up to par with professional animations. This left us with 120 different frames to make our animation. Creating the background setting was fun and making the path for the ball was interesting but then I hit the tedious part of the process...Making each individual frame and saving them individually. We had to adjust our picture to make only one ball show and then save that picture. Then re-hide the ball and make the next one in sequence show up and so on. This process took me about the entirety of one (school) day. There were multiple settings that had to be adjusted with each picture as well as the squashing and stretching of the ball. Squashing and stretching is a technique that is used when animating a bouncing object. The "stretch" is when the ball is in the air and going towards the ground or coming directly out of a bounce. What you have to do to create the illusion of a real bounce is elongate the object for "stretch". For "squash" you have to expand the object outwards and like the name suggests: squash it. You need to do "squash" when your object hits the ground or the frames directly following. I ended up with an animation of a ball falling out of the ceiling in a grocery store and the ball bouncing into a shopping cart. This assignment helped me learn and think about how animations are made as well how to create the illusion of realistic motion.
I like vector graphics and think they can be useful in many different situations. There are lots of things you can do in photoshop with bitmap graphics but the thing I like the most about vector graphics is that you can create images completely from scratch without needing anything outside of the program. I also like that in Adobe Illustrator with vector graphics you can create something a little more practical than just a pretty photograph like you do in photoshop. I think that vector graphics are more useful for designing logos and non-realistic type graphics. They could be used by advertising agencies to make fancy advertisements or by designers to label their drawings or make certain points stand out. Even though we have only been working with vector graphics for a little bit I like using them more than bitmap graphics. I think that I can better express what I am trying to do with vector graphics and the Adobe Illustrator program than with photoshop and bitmap graphics. One big upside to the program is that you can work off to the side of the artboards. I really like this feature because it allows me to test things without having them overlap my artwork or interfere with what I am doing. A negative factor to using vector graphics is that there is a longer process to saving them even though they are usually smaller files than bitmap graphics. I like designing logos and seeing logos that other people design and the program/graphics that allow me to do more of this is Adobe Illustrator/Vector graphics.
These past weeks we have been learning about photoshop and for me this was the first experience I had ever had with photoshop. There were tons of different tools and options so at first it was complicated and it took me a little to get used to doing things fluidly. It was especially difficult because I would learn something one class period and then have to re-learn it the next class period because I forgot. Another problem I faced was when I would fumble with the controls and tools and do something weird. This was very inconvenient because I didn't know how to use the program and I would try different ways of fixing my problem sometimes it would work and others I wasn't too lucky. On one assignment we were tasked with making a sandwich using the different "layer" tools. I liked this assignment because the layers concept made sense it was almost like making a sandwich in real life. For this assignment we had to practice using non-destructive editing which was a new concept for me. Instead of deleting certain aspects we would just hide them so if we needed them later we could easily make them appear. We used a "quick mask" tool that would turn the things we selected a light, translucent shade of pink. I accidentally changed this selection color to a solid black and didn't realize it. I re-read the instructions multiple times and couldn't figure out what was wrong because I was doing everything correctly what I didn't realize is that I had changed the mask color. I got help and I finally got to work. Once I had cleared that roadblock things were pretty smooth. It was things like this that made me wish I had a little more experience in photoshop because I could be completely halted by a minor alteration. My overall experience has been one of learning and I am enjoying it.
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AuthorI am Giacomo Hardin and this is my blog. I will be reflecting on my time in Digital Design and Game Art class. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools Archives
May 2020
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