That’s my haul from the Library Book Sale two weekends ago. More cool stuff than last year, even though I went down after lunch that day.
It’s a good mix of technique, artist centric and theory (not to mention a few plain eye candy books). Sculpture, Form & Philosophy is a book I’ve borrowed from the library before and wished that I had a copy of my own. Ian Norbury’s wood scultures are insanely good. Each one not only has an interesting pose and texture, they each have a story to tell. His technical skill with wood makes his sculptures really look alive. Nick Bantock’s book Artful Dodger is great in how he relates his artistic journey, from early days in art college, painting book covers for a living and finally writing and illustrating his own books (and pop-up books as well!). The Digital Domain book is also something I’ve been meaning to get. I have William’s sharp eyes and generous spirit to thank for that one. Patience & Fortitude was an apt find, considering it deals with libraries and the obsession of book collecting.
For the comics, The World’s Greatest Super-Heroes is one of my favourites. It’s the book that Alex Ross and Paul Dini did after the success of Kingdom Come. I grabbed the book off a heavily loaded cart on a hunch, didn’t even really take a good look at the cover. It was like last year when I saw a portion of a cartoon face obscured amongst other books, dug it up and realised I was holding on to a Princess Mononoke artbook. Gorgeous fully painted art from cover to cover, the stories are pretty interesting too (getting Superman to solve world hunger isn’t as easy as it sounds). The Dark Knight Returns was a great find.
Honestly, both times I’ve been to the sale it’s exceeded my expectations by giving me both what I wanted as well as cool stuff I didn’t know I needed! Add to that the price of $54 for the lot, and you’ve got an annual event that can’t be missed. Looking forward to the next one (and also planning more shelving..)
Having the opportunity to be in this class is amazing, so to make full use of it I’ll be revising what I’ve learnt after each lesson in Zbrush while it’s extra fresh. I’ll be updating this page with more stuff as I go along. There’s a bunch of notes and things I still haven’t quite digested yet. It’s gonna be a tiring 2 weeks with work, night sculpting classes + extra practice – I’m hoping it’ll help me internalise everything quicker and more accurately. Looking forward to Tioman this weekend too, that’ll be a nice intermission..
Here’s a quick 3 hour head study that I did, uploaded and promptly forgot about um.. 2 months ago? Heh, it’s all good though. Work has been pretty busy, every project is pushing my understanding of a variety of subjects. Art wise I’ve been having lots of opportunities to keep things fresh, so my focus lately outside of regular work has been improving my technical skills. So far I’ve put together some macro like mel scripts that turn some multi-step file export processes I had to go through into a single click on a shelf button. Pretty basic stuff though, I’ve been limited by my rather haphazard coding education:
- Being taught BASIC by my dad when I was a kid and writing messy programs like one that filled the screen with circles of random size, colour and position.
- A 5 week course in “Visual” C++ during secondary school – we spent the whole thing coding in DOS, so I’m not sure where the “Visual” went.
Mainly I want the ability to assess a workflow issue that’s annoying the heck out of me, take half an hour to code something and end up with a button that saves me some sanity. This lead me to jump at the opportunity to take a class in the Python scripting language. Python’s pretty interesting because of its ability to interface with different programs via a range of modules. Using the IDLE intepreter, we went through basic python concepts.
One of the main takeaways I had from this recent training is that the fundamental concepts needed to write most programs are simple yet extremely powerful (iterating through loops and comparisons of values form the bulk of most). It’s figuring out what the problem is and how you go about tackling it that’s the problem. If assessed incorrectly, you could end up writing something that leads to more complications in the pipeline.
Anyways, here are some resources that have been helping me in asserting more control on the tech I depend on..
Dusted off a zbrush sketch I had lying around and did some extra detailing and polypainting. After that I rendered a few passes with different matcaps and composited the final image.
Hi everyone! 2010′s been pretty good so far.. still practicing painting with my DS.. 2 of my favourites out of the last two months. I spent more time on these than the earlier ones, still keeping them in the sketch realm tho. The lighting of the fur was pretty tricky, I guess I made it harder on myself by deviating from the reference. Still, I like how it turned out in the end.
On the 3d side of things, I’ve been doing quite a bit of low poly stuff at work lately. Finding it pretty fun, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to try so many different styles. Would like to do some cute low poly stuff in my spare time, well we’ll see.. anyways, 2009 was a pretty good start to life in the industry. 2010′s gonna be the year everything gets set in motion. Just gotta keep working hard, and have fun doing it..
