FMP Week 20 Post Mortem Reflection
The project is over! I've handed my book in and after this blog post University is finished, forever. It's a really scary thought. 3 years at Uni and it feels like it's gone by really quickly.
For my FMP I chose to base characters on phobias, and do illustrations of each character. At this point I'm glad it's over. I don't mean it in a negative way, towards the end of each project I always feel a sense of relief because I just want to move on and work on something new. One thing I'm really happy about is that because I did a lot of different phobias. Each character and painting are quite different from each other, so there was always a sense of variety, I never got too bored of doing one thing for ages, because they were all quite different.
At the start of this project I really struggled with style. Not knowing if I wanted to try and do more stylised paintings or more realistic. As you can see with my first illustration. This one is a LOT more stylised than the rest of my paintings, and even though people seemed to like it I honestly hated it. I don't know why there was just something about it that I didn't like at all. Instead of wasting time trying to fix it I moved on.
In the end I just painted how I usually do. Once I stopped thinking about it too much I just painted in my own style, which is quite realistic, and I'm so glad I decided to do this because I felt so much better about my paintings, and I preferred them over the image above.
My paintings became a lot more consistent once I started just painting in this week, and I wasn't stressing out as much.
When it came to the concepts themselves, this was the bit I struggled with the most. Looking back I do wish I had spent longer on the concepts, and maybe cut down the amount of characters I did. I struggle with coming up with a variety of ideas, I still tend to focus on one idea and go ahead with it. That's not to say I didn't try, I did do iterations of my characters, but they were all quite similar.
There is variation here, but not huge variation, which is something I need to work on. I definitely realised during this project I'm more interested in the illustration side of this sort of work, which is definitely something I'm going to look into in the near future. I didn't necessarily spend longer on the illustrations (it was about 60/40) but the time I did spend on them I enjoyed a lot more.
It's been a few weeks at this point since I finished my last painting for this project, and looking back I wish I had been a bit more creative with my ideas. Sometimes I wish I had come up with a different theme completely, base characters on a book or something, but I'm glad I decided to something quite out of the box, sure it might be hard to display some of my work because it's quite gross/gory, which is something I wish I had looked into before doing this project. But I'm happy with what I've done, I like the paintings, they're different and they're my own ideas. There were some points where I really struggled, right at the beginning as I mentioned before, and also some of the phobias I really struggled to paint. The glass one being one of them.
For this character I really wanted to push myself, and boy did I. I knew glass would be hard to paint, I knew before I even started this character, it's why I put it off for weeks on end because I just wasn't ready to face it. I like the character, I like the idea, I'm just not sure how successful the outcome was. When I look at the illustration mainly it doesn't read as glass to me, it kind of looks a bit jelly like. I had a lot of reference, I even did some studies of glasses to try and understand the properties of glass a bit more. That was all great, but it was really hard to translate that into something like this. The problem is glasses are usually fairly simple in shape, where as a human is very organic, they have a lot of curves to them, so they're two very different things, and it was hard to mimic glass into a human form because of that. This isn't to say I didn't learn a lot. Out of all of the characters this is the one I probably learnt the most with, which is really valuable. Having things that look good is important, but learning is just as important if not more so. This painting visually is probably my least favourite, but I'm really glad I did it.
For this painting I made some zBrush sculpts. I added them into the image and then painted over them, this saved a lot of time and really helped with shading. So I'm happy I decided to do that. I've not really used zBrush before, but I found it pretty easy to use. Though I definitely wouldn't be able to anything too complicated, mushrooms aren't really too hard to make! I'm glad I went a different way with this character, adding a little 3D into it because it's definitely something I'll look at doing more in the future. This was one of the last paintings I did and I'm pretty pleased with it. Looking back at it now there are some shading issues, ie there is none. I'll go back and fix it for degree show, it's not too obvious I don't think but it's really annoying.
One thing I painted a lot in this project is blood. So much blood. It sounds gross but it was actually kind of fun. Blood as it turns out is really hard to paint. It can be glossy when wet but still quite dark with a lot of different tones, and when its dry it has a completely different set of properties to it. So blood can be done in so many different ways, which is one of the reasons I enjoyed painting it so much. I still don't know if it looks completely realistic, but I'm pleased with the outcome, still looks gross which is the point. (Never thought I'd write a mini paragraph about blood, but here we are!)
I've stared at gross things for so long at this point I think I'm basically immune, I don't have the same reaction as someone when they see my painting and go "urg." To me it's just like any other painting I've done. I'm happy with how they look, they look gross which I'm pleased with, but also they just look good.
Overall with this project I'm really pleased with how it came out. There are things I wish I had done differently, spent a bit longer on characters to try and come up with more ideas. Things went wrong, stuff happened during this project that did effect my work, I got sick so got a little behind, I had a lot of stress from student finance early on that effected my mood which effected my work. But those things weren't really in my control, and they soon got sorted out. Do I wish they hadn't happened? Of course I do, if I could go back and change that I'd do it instantly. Am I mad about it though? No. Being mad about things that were out of my control don't help me, and at this point being mad about things I could of done doesn't really help me either. I'm happy with the work I created, I'm happy with how I got there and that I did it. But I'm also happy it's over.
Though it's a really scary thought knowing my education is over, for good this time. Now instead of pretending to be an adult I actually have to be a real one, with a job. At this point I have to think a lot about my future, what I actually want to do with the rest of my life. It's scary.
