Mini projects

Ahri (League of Legends) redesign

For this project, we had to re-design Ahri from League of Legends including her splash art and her ability icons. This was a really fun project to do, and I realised re-designing pre-existing character is really fun to do, especially when you get to consider their character, playstyle, current designs etc. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to properly portray her personality and how to communicate that, and you can see that in my iterative process. We had 2 weeks to do this, which was intense but it was good to help improve my time-keeping skills.

I learnt so much from this project, especially with problem solving and how that works with digital painting too. I constantly went back and fourth between designs, considered why and how I could use these points to influence my future designs, how I could quickly articulate or add focus to certain areas with blending layers, and how important early sketches are to digital painting. I initially was going to go down the lineart route with the splash art, but decided to push myself and fully render with no lines. This was tough since I had never done it before, but from watching my peers do this and used speed paints as reference points, I felt I did pretty well.

Rosetta Stern - a keyframe and props project

Another project at this point was to design 3 props and a AAA keyframe in 2 weeks. I had a lot of fun working on this project, and I worked especially on my sheet layouts as well as my digital painting skills (I had so much fun messing with blending modes and the add effect!) This was another prop project, and nudged me to realise that props are surprisingly fun to create - especially for a specific character. Since this project took place after the Ahri project, I felt more confident in my digital painting skills and used this as an opportunity to push myself once more with it. I focused on clothing especially for this, as 2/3 of my props were items of clothing. I also focused on using photobashing to aid the process to make it faster - all images for this were from UnSplash.

This project was fantastic about learning the pipeline for props and keyframes in a short time, and I have since taken these skills to help me in projects I had done post-this.

Mobile game prop pack

For this next project, we had a week to create a selection of props for a mobile game with an aesthetic of our choosing - so long as it fit with a Ghibli vibe. I went for more of a mystical, purple/cream aesthetic with simple cel shading using the Ghibli aesthetic as a point of whimsical reference. This is the first time I've worked on creating props, and think it came out relatively well. I learnt a lot about how to quickly do prop design as well as how to use 3D model blockouts as reference points.

Brainbug campsite project

For the final project of the unit, we (as in the year 2 students) were very kindly set an external brief by Brainbug to create a few keyframes of a campsite. We were given one week to do this, so this was quite an intense project, but I had a lot of fun doing this.

Unfortunately I did not have time to add much colour since I wanted to focus on getting as many concepts done as I could. I used a mixture of quick digital painting as well as photobashing to create these images showing the full camp, the kitchen area and then the scale/world of the camp and world around it. Despite it being such a quick turnaround, I really enjoyed how this project forced me to work at a quick pace and just commit to ideas early, whilst allowing them to naturally flow as I concept them. This is the core of what concept art is, and one of the reasons I loved this project.

As a first part of this project, I went back to traditional art and just used random art materials I found, which was a fun quick process. I did this for around an hour before using thumbnail sketches to help my idea further. I also used Alchemy as an early point for idea generation.

All of these projects were 1-2 weeks each, and each one I'm really proud of the outcome for. Even if they aren't the prettiest, I had a lot of fun doing them and learnt so much from each individual project. It also helped me to understand what parts I do and don't enjoy about concept art, as well as the parts I need to work on which I have and will continue to do.  I hope by the next Rookie Awards I've made even more progress, and that I can share some really cool projects I've made.