First Day of Project Portfolio Class

We went over the coarse outline, which was the fun part because of what was planned out.  Lessons from Principles of Design, Elements of Design, Character Design, Storyboarding, and Composition.  Our first day was simple, but what we learned blew our minds, it was learning how to switch from your L-mode (Left side) to your R-mode (Right side) of your brain.  The left side of the brain is used to seeing things in its original state, while the right side is the artistic one.

Your L-mode activated

Exercise 1: Draw something using Reference

Take a picture from the internet or facebook (Example friend, or a dragon to list a few).  You have 30 minutes to draw the picture

As you draw, you will notice yourself, going back to the reference, trying to get basic shapes and detail, eventually you get the basic outline and detail sorted out;.  Your 30 minutes are almost gone, or it has ran out, so now take a look at what you’ve put down on paper, you say to yourself “I thought I would have more by the end of the 30 minutes.

This is what will happen if we are to critical, using the reference, don’t worry about the details get the basic shapes first, then go into the details, because you only have a certain time limit

Brett Smith

Exercise 2: Drawing from Memory

Now try to draw something from your imagination, since this is from your memory I tend to go a little bit more on the creative side, and knowing that it is my own creation.  You have 30 minutes to draw something from memory, and you will find that it isn’t easy because your L-mode is still saying “this doesn’t look right, but instead of letting your L-mode do the talking, let your R-mode take over.

Character Creation

Exercise 3: Draw a picture upside down

Here are the steps

1. Print out a reference
2. Look at the reference right side up
3. Flip it upside down, and start drawing from the bottom to the top
4. Whatever you do, don’t flip the picture right side up
5. Time limit is 1 hour
6. At the end of the 1 hour, flip your paper right side up, and compare how close you got it to look like the reference

Knight on horseback

Extra Mini-Exercises are:

Draw your hand, as a reference, and take as long as you need

Then your going to draw your hand again, but this time draw it without looking at the paper.  Just look at your hand, you have 30 minutes to complete it.  At the end of the 30 minutes, look at what you’ve drawn, a whole bunch of line that makes no sense to you, which means for the 30 minutes you’ve been drawing you’ve been able to use your R-mode, instead of your L-mode.

Hand Markings

The second Mini-Exercise is:

Draw a cup

You will notice that once you’ve drawn the cup, and shade in the cup, you will see two faces, and if you do it in reverse you will see a cup.  This is what we call an alpha channel in Maya, and how the program determines black and white is black = 0 while white = 1, and gray is = 0.5.  Black as you know is total darkness, and white is actually color, now that we have established the difference between white and black to create the alpha you would need to invert the selection, so that the white is in the image and the black is in the background.  The reason for this is that when you apply the image to an object in Maya, you will see the object filled with the texture.  However, not all objects needs to have an alpha channel it is only the objects that you want to make transparency, then you would use an alpha, and save it as a Targa in Photoshop, as a 32 bit.  Targa is the only file format that will ask you whether you want to save as a 16, 24, or 32 bit, and in Photoshop we have an RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) value, all of which contains 8 bits.  Which makes a total of 24 bit, but with the alpha added, it adds another 8 bits, making a total of 32 bit.

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Cup and Face Effect

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Tags: Character Design, Composition, Drawings, Elements of Design, First Day of Project Porfolio Class, Outline, Principles of Design, Reference, Storyboarding

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