If you haven't noticed...

If you haven't noticed, I've been going through and posting old class work.  Part of this is because of the way I'm rearranging my blogs, but another part is because I want to keep a record of how I've improved over the years.  I decided to post works from each class all in one post in order to keep things organized and to reduce the number of posts I have to transfer.  I also decided most of my sketch posts aren't worth transferring over, so we're just mostly going to move on from here.  I want to post some concept development for my webcomic to show how that developed, a character I recently developed, then the development of the characters I draw for the campaign I'm playing in right now.  After that we'll be all caught up!

Oh yeah, and I need to repost the process post I did about how I approach my journal comic.

Let's see... other news...  I moved.  My parents built a new house and are letting my husband and me live in the basement rent free.  Now we have to commute to school, but it's saving us a bunch of money.  I graduate in April and need to start looking for a job.  Earning money would be nice.  I've been playing some video games, and I'd like to review them for you sometime soonish.  I started writing another novel for my writing class and have been improving by steps in my drawing for animation class with Jake Parker.  (He's the best teacher I've ever had.  Seriously.)

And I got behind again on homework.  I should really go work on it now.

*skeedadles*

Concept Design 2 - Chook's Story

After taking concept design 1 from Jake Parker, I took concept design 2 from Justin Kunz (2012 winter semester).  Justin used to work at Blizzard on their environment concept design stuff, and it was his first semester teaching at BYU.  He gave us the option of working on redesigning The Wizard of Oz for the class, or doing our own thing.  I chose to do my own thing and did concept development for one of the novels I'm writing.  It helped me to get me thinking about the story.  Lots of what I came up for for this class is already out of date for the story, but hey, it was good to work through.  Let's go through the environment stuff first.

First I did a bunch of castle silhouettes, then designed a couple castles I liked.  However, the castle in the book is now nothing like this.  The only thing that's similar to what's in the book at the moment are the adobe houses along the sides of the cliff walls.

Ok.  Let's move on to characters!

 First we have Chookery.  He spends a large part of the story stuck as a cat.

 Then we have head roughs for the demon king.  We're not going tho even look at his full body sketch... it's atrocious.  On the right we have the first full body sketch for Ruth, our heroine of the story.

This is Finna.  She didn't exist until this class, but wow.  She came into being and demanded a large role in the story.

As part of the final I redesigned Ruth and drew different outfits for her to wear over the course of the story.  She gets tan.

Then after the class was over I went and did a bunch of outfits for Chookery.  I should redo him.  I should redo all of the people.  I have improved a lot since I drew these a year ago.

Now, on to the animals and critters!  I think they're still pretty close to what's actually in the story.

This is Behemoth.  He went through a couple stages before I settled on the bottom blue drawing.

An ogre, and a troll.  They still need some tweaks, but overall I still like them.

 Dragons!  There's going to be dragons in the story.  Any good fantasy adventure needs them.

Unicorns!  We'll have some wild and dangerous ones, and some more tame and friendly ones.

And lastly, a dard.  I drew him after the class as well while I was writing over the summer.  Dard's are real mythical beasts, but of course I'm altering them to be what I want in my story.

So there you have it, a lot of my concept work for this class and my story.  I have improved a lot since then, but I still have a lot more to work on.  Upward an onward!

Concept Design 1 - Pinnochio Concept Work

This is some process work and the final products for my concept design class I took with Jake Parker in late 2011.  We redid Pinnochio for this class, more specifically based on the Disney movie, but I read the book to help with some ideas.  I went with something very, very different from both.

Warning:  Long post.  Lots of pictures!

First we have Gepetto's house.  I decided he was a wizard and trying to create a golem out of clay.

Then Pleasure Island.  It's a floating city in the sky.

Then we designed vehicles.  I cheated and designed a flying turtle.

Then a prop.  I decided to design the wizard's staff.

And now for the characters!  I designed the Blue Fairy, Monstro, and Pinnochio.  I decided to make the Blue Fairy a small, insect-like fairy.

Since Pleasure Island was in the sky, I decided Monstro should be some kind of sky dragon.  After a bunch of sketches I decided to go with something that was a cross between an eastern dragon and a gulper eel.

Then when it came to Pinnochio I thought it would be cool if he was made out of clay.  He would start out as a lump and become more and more person-shaped as he became more human.  I really like how he turned out... and yes.  I know that he resembles No Face from Spirited away.

Then as part of the final project we had to do two story moments.  I chose the Blue Fairy granting Pinnochio life and the escape from Pleasure Island.

Overall, I like some of my concepts and think that this could be a super-cool version of the story.  Maybe I'll play around with it again later, or take some of these elements and put them in a story of my own.