To Give a Daydream Shape: An Exploration into 2D and 3D Art

  Considering we'll be pivoting to something more of that aesthetic. I found it right to look a lot more of that style of fashion. I specifically found myself drawn to the Pretty Cure Anime series for inspiration for this, given that they have a similar vibe to what we wanted to have for our racer. We also looked at some lolita styled clothes and really liked the cute is king type of mentality that some of them seem to follow though mostly sacrificing practicality in the process. Treading that line would be one of our biggest priorities for our character.

  Here's some drawing I did during the Wednesday workshop! I gave a shape some personality. I saw the drama, so I immediately thought of Raquelle. The icon, the energy, and the sass. Here's also the drawing at the very beginning of the lecture.

We ended up liking two specific designs so we tried mixing those two, to different degrees and making variations of them. We had three things specifically that we wanted to keep for our later designs. A whimsical headpiece, the dress and the 'chibi' proportions of the character. We liked this one the most as it treads the line between whimsy and practicality the best This one is cute but the flower seems like it might get in the way of our racer, not very practical. We do like how the dress is basically just a simple triangle though. We like the shoes of this last one, though maybe a little too complicated to push forward. Not too practical when it comes to the outfitting. Cute but not quite what we want. (I worked on this last one, trying to replicate Gale's style)  

 Making a GIF (pronounced like Gift) in photoshop today and I'm probably not gonna be doing this often enough to remember so I'll write down some of the steps to doing it. Limitations to GIF - GIFs are limited to 256 simultaneous colors, so they can't achieve photographic quality. They are not compressed though, these files are small and easily portable. As a heads-up before we start, this GIF being made will be a series of frames. 1. Upload your images and open each frame as a layer in Photoshop 2. Open the Timeline panel and select Create Frame Animation     Window - Timeline - Create Frame Animation 3. Convert your layers into animation frames.     In the right corner menu of the Timeline panel, select Make Frames from Layers.    4. Set your GIF to loop.     Hit the repeat menu to do this.      You can then adjust how long each frame appears with the Timeline panel. 5. Export your GIF and save it.     File - Export...

 I asked around for some feedback on our racer. I'm looking to get a couple opinions on the thumbnails so we can get a good idea on where to take our guy.    Feedback for our Racer: Maggie from my workshop B said that they liked the cuter silhouettes in Gale's work as well as the halo shape around the head. Tessa from my workshop B said that they liked the use of triangles in Gale's work with the dress. Especially with how simple it seemed in comparison to the more complicated shapes in my work.  I guess thats good to know for the future, I suppose. Reuben commented that they liked what I was trying to do with the bird motif, but noted that they liked the kind of hermes boot type of footwear that my last thumbnail seemed to allude to. They also thought the dresses looked really nice. Chil (@justchil) mentioned that they really liked the magical girl vibe of some of the outfits, but mixing it with more practical and grounded elements could really give it that racer vi...

Photoshop feels weeeird after being such a religious CSP user. Color Modes -  RGB for standard digital screen work CMYK for print Grayscale for black and white images You can customize your workspace, you probably arent gonna use some of the default options anyway so change around your panels. (Window menu if you can't find anything) Quick Export as PNG might not save the image with a transparent background When transforming an image with Ctrl + T, holding shift will scale the image while maintaining the aspect ratio OR rotate the image by increments of 15 degrees (woah). Levels - Levels adjustment seems cool, probably should play around with it a bit more. Image - Adjustments - Levels    or     Ctrl + L Basically corrects the contrast and detail of an image by adjusting intensity of shadows, midtones and highlights Hue/Saturation - Image - Adjustments - Hue/Saturation      or      Ctrl + U Gradient Map -  Image - Adjustme...

I looked at a lot of bird pictures today. I think they're pretty cool. I like how their claws look especially. --- I think the project might be going too fair in one direction so I might try to push a lot to keep some of the aspects that I like in. I like the direction that they're going in but I should probably try to keep some of my original vision in before its just fully their work. I hope we can find a good enough middle ground for this. I might be tunneling into my vision a little bit but I didn't want something explicitly too gendered if that makes sense? A lot of my earlier ideas didn't quite pass for quite flimsy reasons so I'm hoping I can get that across. 

Probably still need to do a bit more work when I try to imply 3D forms. Bonus: What I drew to warm up!

  Here are different thumbnails for our racer that my groupmate, Gale and I have crafted up. My work consists of the ones with the darker gray backgrounds. --- Here are our racer thumbnails. While Gale opted to lean more into the fairy aspect of the character, I took the opportunity to use the live inspiration to play with the character's silhouette and shape language used. --- These ones here are our thumbnails for our vehicles. I wanted to really push some live inspiration element to our racer somehow most of these play with using the silhouettes of birds or bird motifs as well as some antique motifs, if thats somewhere we want to pursue with our racer. Gale seemed to pursue a more 'cart' shape to the vehicle so our work stays a bit more grounded.

  I have asked two of my online friends to give me feedback on my early thumbnails for the "Wacky Racer". --- LoVER BoY || @shn33p  said that It could be good to have more decorative elements like ribbons or the like to lean more into the fairy aspect of it. Though I did like the wing motif that the character seems to stick to. Its quite hard to read them as a "racer" because of how busy the outfit looks. chai || @chaiera said that Its hard to get a grasp on how the vehicle would look due to the head on angle that majority of those thumbnails have. I like the ideas for the forms but you could go a little harder on the shapes, its a little too cluttered so maybe simplify them. --- The most important thing I need to do is to fix up my silhouettes. I need to make the shape language stronger to sell that racer kind of silhouette. I also need to find a way to give it some detail without overcluttering (maybe a secondary color?).  My vehicles are mostly fine, they just ne...

  POV - Me, finally understanding why Indesign isn't working how I want it to Blue lines how I loathe you,, (Hide these with Ctrl + H) You can lock specific elements for ease of use by right clicking and selecting it on the drop down. Some shortcuts cause I am lazy and don't wanna have to drag my mouse everytime. V - Selection Tool A - Direct Selection Tool (What is the difference???) P - Pen Tool T - Type Tool I - Eyedropper Tool E - Free Transform R - Rotate S - Scale  (Ugh, even after this I still probably just brushed the surace) Last but very Important, when importing images into your moodboard, an orange outline refers to scaling and transforming the imported image. Blue lines refer to cropping and image borders. That was such a pain. Remember to scale them down to size early, just so you save yourself a headache when trying to select a specific image later down the line.

  This is the moodboard for our "Wacky Racer" The aesthetic we used for our constraint was "Fairycore" The live inspiration was "birds of prey", further narrowed down to "Owls" We needed to create a "Land" Vehicle for our racer. In our minds, we had a bit of an antique collector who is racing for more funds to buy antiques with. They need these funds since they have an obsession with constantly buying up antiques they find. They really need to win as their funds are starting to really dry up and winning the race would also be really good publicity for their store. Their vehicle accompanying them should be their mobile antique store (not very practical to have antiques in a mobile vehicle, but they'll figure it out). They drive it around for good advertising, though some antiques might take a tumble here or there. On the surface they seem eloquent, but they resort to underhanded methods. They bribe other racers with trinkets, throw a...

  How I feel crawling back to Pinterest for university, years after recovering from my Pinterest hyperfixation phase back in Year 10... I HATE how hard it is to find the original source is when looking for images through Pinterest. Its still really good for moodboarding though. (AI slop aside) I underestimated how hard this was gonna be, I usually just draw whatever I want so I found myself often skipping this phase. Throw in a partner and it might be a little hard to manage, we will see though. I know I will struggle in making the vehicle, so here is to hoping that goes down pretty easy. Neither me nor my partner seems to want any part in that, so we shall see. Kinda wanna challenge myself with this.

  They wanted us to scribble on the page. I like this and actually do this at the very beginning of some of my older sketchbooks because I put too much pressure on myself deciding what to start drawing and put off drawing for way too long.

  This is definitely not an excuse to pass off my collection as a "household item". Though in all seriousness, I really like this bookshelf. Its really big and fits a lot of my books. The biggest contributor as to why I love this shelf, is that its really simple. The neutral color helps to avoid distracting away from the items I want to show off. My books, my trinkets and my stickers contrast well with the material. While the wood grain texture keeps it from looking too flat. The bookshelf is also really handy in a functional way. The way that you can slot in the panels to adjust the size of the shelves to account for larger items really helps with its flexibility.