My Art: Samus Aran

After posting the artwork of Samus, I decided I might as well show you all by own doodle of her. It may not be nearly as impressive as thiago-almeida's work, but I'm still proud of it as it is pretty much the first picture I have ever drawn using nothing but a computer.

Funnily enough, this started out as a quick doodle in between classes at my school. I enjoyed to process of making this image and am now working on a significantly more ambitious project using both Illustrator and Photoshop. Stay tuned!

Artist Focus: thiago-almeida

Today's artist focus is one another person from DeviantART: thiago-almeida

He is mainly known for his highly detailed black and white sketches of various monstrous fantasy creatures or mechanical humanoid figures. However, I will be showing two of his less common pieces: full color artwork. There were many to choose from, but I went with two of pictures of the sci-fi bounty hunter Samus Aran from Nintendo's Metroid franchise. She is one of my favorite fictional characters due her not only having awesome armor but that she is a strong female character who doesn't exist simply to be eye candy like so many other women in video games.

 

This first picture is simply titled Samus. I really like the colors and lighting used here, with strong contrasts between both the warm of the orange and the cool blue of the background to the strong difference in lighting that really makes this piece pop. I must say I also really like the dynamic pose.

Thiago-almeida's second piece is titled Super Metroid, and features the monstrous alien Kraid approaching our hero in the distance. I appreciate all the detail put into the armor and think that the lighting is wonderfully creepy. It's sort of a cool, sick blue-green that serves to make the corpulent form of Kraid all the more intimidating. The fact that Samus is seemingly still unaware of Kraid adds tension to the piece that is lacking in the first image.

If you want to see more of his work I've included this handy link: http://thiago-almeida.deviantart.com/gallery/

Launching the Imagination - Chapter 6:My Thoughts

Chapter 6 of our book was titled Cultivating Creativity and was how to help ourselves be more creative. Honestly, this is an area that I need to work on, so this chapter felt like it was almost written for me. It really got me thinking of exactly what my personality is and how I related to the examples given.

There was this little illustration on positive and negative loops, which brought to mind a negative loop I had been stuck in a few weeks ago for my schoolwork. I had gotten sick which slowed down my progress, causing a snowball effect of falling behind more and more. This lead to me becoming increasingly depressed and feeling like I should just give up. It wasn't until my teacher helped me with goal setting that I got on the positive path of catching up that I'm currently on.

There were many small categories of attributes of creative people, and while individually they may not seem important, when put together they allow one to function at their full potential. I myself would like to improve in many of these categories to help aid me in improving my present and future work. Everything from making the most of my time to thinking outside of the box are just a few of the areas I would like to grow in.

Zelda Demake: Making a Retro Game Even More Retro

While browsing a Zelda fansite recently I stumbled across an interesting article about a programmer named Ben Purdy who recreated the classic game The Legend of Zelda in 48 hours. However, the way he did so was interesting, as it was a demake. Demakes are when a recreation of a game purposely programs the game to be more primitive than how it had originally been. In this case, the game is incredibly pixelated, even compared to the original which was made in 1986.

As you can see, the game uses the absolute bare minimum amount of pixels needed (16x16) to allow the played to understand what is occurring in the game.

 If you are interested in finding out how he went about creating the game or would be interested in trying it for yourself, I have included a handy Link.
...
Ok, that was a pretty bad pun.


http://www.benpurdy.com/blog/2014/3/demaking-zelda

Launching the Imagination - Chapter Five: My Thoughts

Chapter five of our book was titled Problem Seeking and Problem Solving. Just as the name of the chapter says, it is about how we as designers have to identify issues and then how we go about coming up with ideas of how to meet said issue. The first example of how the Eames team came up with a solution to make a comfortable chair for indoor use that took up minimal space was an excellent way to show off this concept. The author of the book gave same excellent criteria for what characteristics a problem should have,  such as being significant (worth the time and effort to deal with) and being comprehensible (able to be understood so that effort isn't wasted).

After this, the chapter got into something I had never heard of before: convergent vs divergent thinking. Convergent thinking can be summed up as a linear method of solving a goal one has in mind from the very start. Having a very clear idea of the issue and what the game plan to solve it is essential for success. On the other hand, divergent thinking is more creative and less set to one given path of how to solve an issue. The benefit to this method is that it can be very effective at coming up with unconventional solutions, but it can suffer from a lack of efficiency. In general, convergent thinking is the better option for collaborative efforts while divergent thinking allows independent artists to come up with groundbreaking ideas. I'm able to see how I use these techniques without realizing it in my life, with group projects at school being very organized compared to the more freestyle like quality of my individual work.