Week 1 Overview/Targets - Returning to College/Starting Year 2

This week, I returned to college for the second year. During the week, I enrolled for the second time, and took part in class activities.

One of the first things done in the week was a few unit overviews, using the module guides. This was done by Dave in class, with myself and the class listening and asking questions when needed. This was fairly straight forward, as we had done many of these overviews last year. After doing the module overviews, I enrolled for the second year of the college course, using my student finance paperwork. 

We also discussed ideas this week, and what we had been up to over the break period from college. This was a group discussion and was fairly laid back. I generally spoke about how I had mainly been working on trying to improve my drawing skills, and working on a cartoon style for drawing characters.

On Friday morning, we had a session of Adobe Illustrator re-cap led by Dave, where we went over the basic tools and skills that can be used in the software. I found this rather enjoyable and actually produced some work I was happy with (which to be honest, is a rarity). The illustration I made was of a cartoon skull, made out of a slime like liquid. The idea for this came from a doodle I did in my sketchbook. The final product can be seen below.

I made this by first taking the doodle I had in my sketchbook, and taking it into Illustrator. After this, I used the Pen tool to create line work based on the original sketches lines. After doing this, Dave showed me a pretty cool technique that uses the Pathfinder window. Dave showed me how to 'cut out' the shape from a background shape by using this, so that only a silhouette remains in the background. After doing this, to create the slime effect, Dave showed me the Blend function. This effectively allows you to create a blend between two objects, such as two differently coloured rectangles. When you use the blend function on these shapes, the software will 'fill in the gaps', and transition any discrepancies, between the two shapes, by adding new shapes between them. After learning how to do this, I made a wavy, slimy-looking shape, and picked a colour. I then made another, with different bumps and troughs, and then picked another colour. After using the blend tool, it created a wave of colour, to put behind the shape with the skull silhouette on it. Doing this left the appearance of only the skull, with the slime on it.

For next week, I feel that I need to accomplish a few things:

• Develop my character/story for my animation: This is important because this first module is only short, and I need to keep track of my time.
• Experiment a bit more in Adobe Illustrator: Although this isn't vital to my success for this module, I feel like a bit more experience with this software could be helpful, as I personally enjoy using it, and I am a bit rusty after having a long period of time off from college.
• Create a list of characters that I like: Doing this could help inspire me for my animations, so it is a worthwhile task.