24 Hour Game Development

Last night through to early this morning, I was the character artist for a 24 hour game dev. group, compromising of other people on my course at University. I also did backgrounds, animations and a few other assets.

We lost, but we're continuing development of the game, and as such I won't be uploading any other assets till the game is on the marketplace, however this is the title screen of the game we produced, Cogs and Robbers.

A short introduction to my work style: I use a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet and Adobe Photoshop Elements 8.0. I'm also currently trying out a few other packages, such as Painter, aswell as the 3D packages Maya, 3DS Max and Mudbox.

This image was created in 2 hours using Photoshop. It was done at around 3am, and as you can tell, I got a little trigger-happy with the filters. The robot making up the background was produced using the plastic wrap effect, while the hero robot's crown uses the Chrome effect. The need for increasing shine was probably fueled by my cola and candy high, though looking back on it with a clearer head, I don't dislike it as a whole, which must be a good thing?

While I went a bit over the top on the filters, my personal favorite part of this image is the princess, Diskette. No special effects (bar Blur) were used for her creation, and I'm particularly a fan of the look of dreadlocks, which I believe I managed to capture here with her coiled-strips-of-copper hair.

The finished game should hopefully be available in the next few months.

My New Blog

WELL
I'm Karen Fielding, an aspiring digital artist, and this will be my digital art blog till I get my first art job in the games industry!

As the title shows, I already have a plan on how I'm going to do this. However, at the moment, I'm still in my last 2 months of university, so while I'll still be updating this blog before we get into Summer, there won't be ~regular~ updates till the 2nd June.

From the 2nd June onwards, there will be 1 update every weekday, all as part of the plan.

Now, the plan...

June 2nd 2011 till September 1st 2011(approx.)
Weekend job to pay towards holiday (Florida, early till late September).
During the week: 5+ hours minimum per day creating 1 piece of digital art.
Each piece MUST:
Have a background..
Be challenging in some form.
Follow a colour scheme.
Be visually impressive!

During this time I'll also be looking for freelance work and potentially working on an indie game with a group of university friends.

Late September 2011 till June 2012
Full time job, visiting The Boy on weekends.
During the week: 2+ hours minimum per day on digital art.
One piece may last multiple days in this stage.

Once June 2012 rolls around, The Boy will be graduating and we'll be moving where-ever the jobs are. As he's invested in getting hired into the games industry too, we'll likely be moving to one of the game company hubs around England. And as such, this brings us around to the time limit....

This is the point I want to be hire-able at.

SO! The plan is to do very frequent updates and hopefully some freelance work, work up some contacts and references, and have an impressive portfolio by around this time next year.

Wish me luck!