FMP: Week 19-Finish?
Well the book arrived, I finished my poster, got it printed and I can now manage on just 5 hours of sleep a night! Feeling really tired at the moment and can't wait to hand in this project and put my feet up. Here's a badly lit photo of the book and the poster on my bed.
Apart from an embarrassing spelling mistake, the book looks ok. I am really glad I chose to print on mid tone paper rather than white as the images would have looked far too dark without it.
I suppose I will do a little reflection on the FMP as a project now that I'm pretty much finished (apart from the degree show.)
FMP Reflection:
I started off bright eyed and keen to get stuck into my FMP. A naive and over ambitious youngster. I now feel like a tired old man who has been looking at a screen in the dark for too long.
I haven't had a bad time with this project though. I have learnt a lot and have improved my skills overall, which is at the end of the day the most important thing to gain from any project in my opinion.
I think chosing to do a almost exclusively 2D FMP was a very good idea for me, as I have a tendency to lose interest in projects very fast, especially if I find them boring. Concept art is what I enjoy doing the most, so if I hadn't gone down this route, I would probably have gone insane or dropped out.
The strongest part of my FMP is definitely the character design. I spent the most time on this part of the project and I think it shows. I will continue to work on my environment skills but will definitely focus more on more character based work.
The part I struggled with most in the FMP, as I predicted, was with time management. Although this is partly due to getting some freelance work during the time I was working on The Golden Pear, I think I should have made some kind of schedule or timetable, though these have never worked for me in the past. I feel that scheduling time to make art can have bad effects on my work.
Choosing to make a book was a good idea too. Before I started the FMP properly I had only intended on producing a poster with a series of prints and characters. Choosing the format of an art book forced me to create my work based around how it would look printed in a book. This is a similar mindset to working freelance as you have to be aware of what your work is being used for and create it to fill that purpose.
One thing I would definitely change if I were to do another FMP would be to do a project that has a FIXED AMOUT OF WORK for it. Not having a limit on the amount of work I could produce for this project drove me slightly mad and I felt as if I was slacking off all the time even if I had made a lot of progress.
I think in conclusion this project has given me some more professional work I can add to my portfolio and I have definitely improved as a concept artist. Working on one thing for 20 weeks didn't feel good to me and I can't say I'm 100% happy with the outcome, but overall I had a good time doing it and I'm ready to jump into the scary world of freelacing!
Below is a great big pile of scrapped designs, unused characters and works in progress that will stay in progress forever.
some enemies for a different location.
Misc villain I couldn't find a place for in the book.
A scrapped cavernous area was going to have these glowing dragons that trap people in their mouths by pretending to be the exit to the cave.
An early line up of the characters from The Golden Pear before I added more.
Props for the dark forest
Below are all early designs for Cedric and Beezl, who were originally going to be called Cog and Dat.
These designs for the swamp didn't make it as I felt they didn't fit the style of the rest of the FMP. The design was something I thought was cool though.
Finally, a scrapped idea of what was going to be Putro's vehicle, a giant skull robot. Once I redesigned Putro I did't feel that a robot suited his character.
