My fall semester finals

With the fall semester finally over, it is time for me to put up my final projects!

First, my digital painting class final. The requirement was to design a book cover. Since I'm currently really in the Wheel of Time series, I knew I wanted to do a fantasy book cover. I researched a bunch of fantasy book covers and started drawing very tiny thumbnails of any idea I had, which weren't that many. I wanted a high value contrast, practically pure black and pure white against each other, which works very well for attracting attention. I really liked the bottom left thumbnail the most so I thought, yes, I'll do a big phoenix! Cool!

But when I started painting it, I realized... what the heck did I get myself in? I was still new to digital painting, I don't have any kind of painting background at all and I picked one of the hardest thing to do, fire. How was I supposed to show form? Bad enough fire is not a tangible object, the whole thing was a big light source! I was completely stuck. I had no clue at all on how to do this. I calmed myself down, tried to break it down to the most basic shapes and take it one at a time. It's a bird, it has wings, a body and a head. Okay. Next... I'll just create my own shadow pattern. I wanted it to be scary and mystical... that gave me the idea of having the "light source" coming from below instead from the usual above. Hey, it made an eye-leading, focal point straight to the bottom, happy accident! I put a sorceress on top of a mountain right at the whitest part of the phoenix. The illustration was evolving. My teacher then showed me how to use corel painter for doing the flames. I experimented, kept working on it till I ended up with this. I'm really happy with how it came out.

Secondly, the animatic of my 2D animation short film! With the feedback and suggestions of my classmates, friends and teachers, I've worked on the story and the character design on this the whole semester. It has  evolved quite a bit from my original thumbnails. I want to get it perfect since I do plan to having this finished to put on my demo reel. It's a bit longer than what I should aim for but I don't really want to cut anything out of it anymore. Good luck on me finishing this.

My short film animatic - 4th pass from Karen Chan on Vimeo.

Lastly, my character design class. Our final was to do a maquette. I wanted to do the little girl in my animatic but my teacher told me that he'd want me to show her personality and character clearly in one maquette. He told me to make it clear if she was a good or bad character. I ended up going with bad because i thought it would be cuter. So her character has been redesigned. A good friend of mine helped me with making the armature and lent me his tools for sculpting since the only sculpting I ever did was in my life was a year ago. He even suggested that I should do effects since she's casting a spell, have stars spiral out of her wand. I thought it was a cool idea. It was fun sculpting and it turned out pretty cute. Too bad I forgot to sandpaper it before I sprayed primer on it but oh well. I want to color the stars and put golden glitter glue on the wires for color. I'll probably work on it after the holidays and post it up again.

haha she has a tiny back and a cute booty