Girl Pirate Dress-up game

My tutors set me the task:

"Do Something you've never done before; something outside your comfort zone. Something you never thought you'd do but perhaps have always wanted to do."

So I decided to make a flash dress-up game!! I recently found a tutorial that showed me how you can program such a game in flash so I decided to give it a go. I've always wanted to make one of these, I'm glad I was given an excuse to do it.

This was out of my comfort zone for two reasons:

1) Flash I have used Flash in the past, but it is definately my weakest program. Every time I use it (which is hardly ever) I have to relearn the way it works.
2) The last day Spending all that time vectorizing the pirate and girl and all her clothes, and hoping that I would be able to program it all to make it work on the last day was not an experience I enjoyed!

I'm planning to make some kind of activity pack for my FMP, so this was a lovely way to test out one of the things i was thinking of doing. Of course this is a very basic game, and if I was to take this further I could be much more ambitious with working buttons and changing backgrounds etc. Also, I could make her clothes look more realistic. Not having the time to add folds and shadows to the clothes made me die a little inside. :p


Play the game here!


Enjoy,

xLouisaxx

Stop-frame animation cherry!

My tutors set me the brief "Make a 3 minute video....". So naturally, if any subject is groovy it's going to be about art. I love motivational quotes and I love art, so I've made a stop-frame animation about art quotes.



To be honest, not bad for my first ever stop-frame animation. The problems I had with this brief were:

1) I have no video-editing software or powerful computer at home so I found this brief to be horrificly unfair for people in my situation (especially with a shoddy University library that is barely open).

2) The video-editing software I opted to use was IMovie which I've never used before. It's a bit rubbish though isn't it, I mean, you can't do any faster than 10fps which means that I had to delete TONS of photos in order to make it less than 3 minutes long. This also added to the horrible jerky movements of the animation.

But whatever, I can't change it now, this is what I am submitting, and in general I am proud of it; cock-ups and all.

What have I learnt?

Well, now that I've made my first stop-frame animation, and made just about every mistake you possibly can with this method, hopefully this means that when I have to make another stop-frame animation IT WILL BE AMAZING!

All the best,

xlouisax

An amazing 'No Smoking' collection

You always find gems when you're not looking for them. That's how I felt when I stumbled across Daniel Eatock's "ongoing collection of alternatives to compliment the archetypal ‘No Smoking’ sign(s)".

You can check out all of them on Eatock's website. You should, some of them actually made me lol!
http://www.eatock.com/project/no-smoking-sign-request/

xx

Living out of boxes

I am at my parents house and there is nothing to do! I brought my laptop and tablet with me, hoping that I would finally get some time to do some art but I'm a wally and seem to have forgotten my power lead!

It's annoying because for the past few weeks I've been busy moving to my new house and having no internet, so I haven't really been able to do anything.

So I decided there is nothing for it, I'm stuck here with nothing to do, so I am completing my favourite retro game of all time, 'Skies of Arcadia'!





I'm not even joking how much I love this game; it has got to be 12 years old and it still sends shivers down my spine! I actually think it was one of the main reasons why I initially wanted to become a concept artist. And I run its fanclub on Deviantart.com, which I recently revived (MEGA-GEEK!) :D

Oh, and I also recently bought the official soundtrack; the most awesome game sountrack ever written!

I shall listen to it while finishing off some of my current SoA fanart. <3 <3

All the best,

xLouisax

Classical painting

I went to the Tate Britain the other day, which is my favourite gallery in London. All of the paintings there are absolutely amazing, but I came across one that I've never really noticed before.



Francis Danby, (1793-1861) 'The wood nymph's hymn to the rising sun'

This is so beautiful! I never thought I'd like such a dark painting but all of the elements work together so beautifully. It must be the soft glow of the rising sun; the warmth of its colour and the power it has over all of the other elements of the painting. A snap-shot of a precious moment at dawn. Definately a fave <3

Grayscale painting

I took last week's Chow as an excuse to try a new method of painting; to paint the whole thing in grayscale, and then add the colour on top with a 'colour' blend layer.

I found this method reaaallly challenging! :( I'd figured that it would be important to get the blacks and whites right, so that the colours would come out well, but it's sooo easier said than done. All the colours came out reaaally wierd and I felt like I had absolutely no control over what I was trying to do.

Maybe the grays I was painting over were completely wrong or maybe I just need to get the hang of this method a little more. Either way, I will try this method again, and I can only get better at it right?



Last week's chow was Marie Antoinette. CAKE!

Environment of the week

I've been really getting into www.conceptart.org lately and all of their community acvities, particularly Environment of the Week and Character of the week. I've actually got off my arse and competed in them!

I'm hoping that being involved with something like this, and competing as often as I can will develop and sharpen my skills. It's nice because everybody helps each other out and shares advice and the whole experience is really encouraging. S'all good!






I think one of the reasons why it's so good is because the theme of the week is always completely random which makes excellent practice for a concept artist. Above is my entry for EOW's 'Into the woods' theme, which was extremely challenging because I've never painted a woods before! Tres tricky :'(





Also here was my entry for CHOW's 'Gaia' which I went off-breif a little with ^_^' but I still kinda like it!