Cool, so I just finished my last quarter at SCAD and once I return the rented text book, which I opened maybe once this whole time, I will be eligible for graduation! This past two some years were quite amazing. It might be rose-colored glasses but looking at the senior works of all my classmates I’ve been studying with for the past couple of years makes me really appreciate the school and all the teachers I had the opportunity to take. Everybody grew so much in this time. I grew so much in this time.
Thank you SCAD for the opportunities, my peers for the peep talks and helpful critics and most of all my professors who were there to guide me through this all.
Latest works of all kinds:
Notes to myself
- Don’t finish the work at the end of the day. Leave the finishing bids for the next day so that you will have an easy and fun start. This also allows to see the work with fresh eyes before turning it in.
- If you feel a lot of resistance while sitting to work, it might be the case of giving too much importance to the work. Depends on the work, some ways to tune down the importance is to make the work more goofy, horrible or any other extreme from what you set to do. You can always edit it back if needed. Again, depends on the work. Or find ways to accept your weakness and stop fussing about it FGS.
- Patience! Even when time is pressing, skipping stages will only prolong the work. Weak foundation will cause collapse and the redoing of the whole work.
- You are the biggest critic of your work. It is always better than what you think of it. Unless you really love it in which case it might be the opposite ;p but in this case who cares as long as you like it.
- Draw daily, even on your weakest days. Not necessarily because you need to draw every day to improve, on bad days you don’t make much progress in this regard, but because you always need to be in shape for when the muse hits and you need to act. Otherwise, you will be practicing when you need to be creating. Easier to always stay in shape.
- Designing (characters, environment, concept, etc) – can be intimidating at times especially if you are doubting your skills but the process is mostly straight forward. 1. (fun part) You research the topic and looking for tons of cool references. If time is pressing don’t overdo this as it burns through your creativity tank pretty fast. 2. Draw the references you collected as you see fit. Also, quite fun and is both a good warm up and an important designing stage. 3. Silhouettes or small drawings – now that you know what things looks like and how to draw them you can start the actual designing stage. Silhouettes can be fun and helpful but drawing in small chi-bi like style can also work well. 4. Start the design. At this point it won’t longer be intimidating and you will know what to do. A tip for the character design – you can start from silhouette or by drawing every article of clothes separately and then combining it. Better off is to mix the two techniques. One would be responsible for the shape and your final goal while the other helps you to build the character and its personality as you decide what each piece is and where the character got it.
- Most of all, Don’t Worry. You are not responsible for your art anyways. It all comes from the muse goddesses. The more calm and open minded you are the better you will hear her whispers and the more positive reactions you will get.
- Have fun!