It’s been a year since I started working in the games industry, and during this time I’ve started to look at my work more critically. I want to improve my fundamental drawing skills and I hope that in a few more years I can specialise in visual development/concept art. So, a month ago or so I started to think about creating a little manifesto for myself – after talking with a coworker who wanted to clone himself for productivity and make a manifesto for his clones.
I’m generally wary of things like new year’s resolutions and drastic measures so my manifesto is a little gentler and pretty flexible. I’m still working on it as I know I need to factor in my job and also time to ‘relax’ (ha ha ha).
At present I already make a point of drawing almost every day (usually every day unless there’s some giant social commitments like weddings to attend… actually I drew at the last wedding I went to) and have managed to keep up with some Japanese. If I have a weekend free I will spend at least a day working on digital art related things (illustrations, masters study, photo study, artwork for our games) and I feel like I learn a lot during these days. Still, there’s a colossal amount more to learn and there always will be!
Things I want to do:
- draw every day
- try to work on 3DS Max tutorials a little each week
- work on video game projects with the dirty casuals every weekend during which I’m not travelling around the UK
- keep up with Japanese revision
- Japanese grammar study either in class or at home when I have no class
Things to play around with sometime:
- mech
- male characters
- architecture
- material studies (feather, honey, skin, etc.)
- facial features studies
- knitting
- find the motivation to do drawabox.com in its entirety (cannot put this in the above list yet because I do not yet trust myself to fight on with this project!)
- zbrush
- water in landscapes
- interiors – 3d space – perspective