Term 10, Brainstorm School Spring ’23, Week 1
Retrospective
I’m back into my normal groove … almost. It’s more difficult to make myself work than it has been in the past, but hopefully I can push through it. When I finished my homework for ENT 1 I got a burst of motivation. It seems that doing work is the cure for not wanting to do work. I also recommend the Huberman Lab podcast. He talks a lot about motivation, the role dopamine plays, and how to regulate it with healthy habits.
Log
Drawings and Critiques
I did some architecture studies to warm up before my classes started. These were free hand, without and perspective guidelines.
Some friends of mine have an art group where they occasionally create fun drawing prompts. The first was “Draw a villain from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles without looking at reference.” I drew Baxter Stockman. Here’s the toy I was basing this on, and the result. I hadn’t seen this toy in about 30 years.
The second challenge was “Draw a centaur with a non-human top half.” Since I already was drawing architecture, I threw a building on a horse and voila! Centaurchitecture.
Modeling a Russian tower in Blender. I tried using geometry nodes, but it proved more useful for certain areas than others. I tried it for circular arrays, but didn’t find much advantage over other methods.
ENT I
This semester we’ll be building a portfolio project. I chose a Robin Hood point-and-click Sierra adventure game from the 90s as inspiration. I loved this game as a kid. I wanted Robin Hood’s outlaws to live in castles built tree-house style in giant sequoias. I already regret choosing a forest setting though. Trees are really hard to draw. This week we were supposed to do 50 thumbnails, with the goal of getting at least “10% of an idea.” I used the sketching method that the instructor (Kenny Vo) used, which was a 50% opacity brush and the smudge tool at 99% strength. I blame the sloppiness of these on my unfamiliarity with that method. The nice thing about it is that it’s prone to happy accidents.
