First week of my break is over, one more week to go.

So... after one week, what have I accomplished?

Lets take a short look:

1) Failed to kill Tigerex in Monster Hunter Freedom 2. but went to elder rank 4 anyway.

2) Got Black Getter Revoltech for only 24 bucks at CSC. Hell yeah.

3) Shat gigantic bricks upon watching Gurren Lagann 26.

4) Bought Armorhide, but his play factor is limited by his simplicity in transformation and size.

5) Went searching for a reasonably priced bumblebee 08, only to miss the OG exclusive 2 pack and finding the lowest price of 50 dollars at CSC. Didnt bother buying because of the different variations to come in the next few months.


Not really accomplishments, but at least its better than sleeping for an entire week.

-_-) I really need to get off my ass and find a job, but there's only 1 more week till school starts anyway.

Rationale of Banner

Well, for this post I will explain my rationale behind by blog image , how the fusion of two different art styles resulted in this image, and why it changed so much from the early development stages.

First off, I'll touch on the idea behind the image.

The main purpose was to create an artwork which also contained the influence of another designer, in this case the other person who I am referencing will be Philippe Starck his profile can be located on an earlier posting.


Starck's main design style mainly focuses on making streamlined and practical household products. Taking this into consideration, I decided to focus on his habit of streamlining designs. The reason why I focused on streamlining was because my previous illustrations mainly consisted of designs which were both large and bulky. By making a streamlined design I would be trying something new which I have never considered doing, and at the same time I will be able to fuse two different art styles together.

I started out by drawing a bulky design, which can also be seen in my development submission package, and slowly worked from there to form a more rounded, curvy, streamlined form. After reaching at least stage 3 of the streamlining process and taking a good look back at the original design, I had a really good laugh after seeing the drastic changes involved. The design basically went from blocky, to triangular, to pointed, and finally a curved and streamlined look.




Each design itself was refined until I was satisfied. I was honestly very satisfied once I drew the first streamlined outline, but I felt that it wasn't enough, so I refined it again and again until I eventually hit the final design, which was full of curves and had minimal amounts of straight lines. Joints became circular, and the overall form was changed to feel more organic, this is most noticeable in the arm area.

After this came the color scheme. I immediately got stumped. I had no idea how to follow Starck's coloring style as he did not use a constant coloring style in his products as he does not create single expressive pieces. During the development process I decided to try as many color schemes as possible, even using orange and grey as these colors are the main colors on his website.

Having done some research, he is most famous for using wood, plastic, metal, and glass in his furniture, but I had no idea how to properly incorporate this into a mainly robotic design.
So... how did I solve this problem?

Simple.

Since Starck most commonly used aluminum, I added a gray finish to simulate metal, and added different types of shading to make the finish stand out. After referring to his previous works (or more accurately the w.w stool and the S+ark Microsoft mouse), I decided to use a dark blue color scheme which radiated blue light from certain features such as the chest and eye areas. I did not want to make it glow too much because it would take the focus off streamlining and put it on glowing blue instead.

An example:


I was pretty satisfied, so I went on to the next step. Posing.




I eventually went with the second pose because the focus would be more on the design and it wasn't as odd as the first pose.


Having done that I eventually drew another image in pose #2, then made a wave background to give it a futuristic and streamlined look. I originally had the concept of putting cartoon-like representations of the 4 commonly used materials, but I decided that it kind of spoiled the image because one looked extremely serious and the rest was off character.

This was the unused concept:


Having done that I eventually changed the design of the background to include an aluminum finish because that is a popular choice made by starck when metal finish is concerned.



I added the finishing touches by duplicating the image of my design and fading it against the metal. My more commonly used font, in this case it is Bank Gothic, was used for the blog title.

I titled it the "Soul of metal", because the mechanical designs are mainly regarded as lifeless metal constructs but I believe that each machine has its own purpose to fulfill and that they are all built for a reason and therefore they are all "alive" until they have truly finished serving their purpose. The blog's theme was mainly made to match the image as the color for the overall background was also dark blue to match the colors of the banner.

Furthermore, unlike the more recent habit of giving them lifeless eyes I decided to give the face a more organic look with eyes with pupils because many living animals have a similar shape in their eyes. This further compliments why the design is special and different from my previous artworks. The machine is powered by it's pilot's determination, guts, hard work, spirit, hopes and dreams, as well as through hot blooded motivation.

In summary, most of starck's use of metal and a brushed aluminum finish as well as his usage of streamlining and making features such as the glow on the S+ark Mouse, combined with my interest in mechanical design and giant robots from Japanese animation, eventually led to a fusion of both ideas which formed the streamlined mechanical design featured in my blog image.


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I know this might have been a long read, but I am glad that you managed to read through all of it! Thank you.

Preview #2 and #3

Might be submitting either one... Done over 20 variants already...

First one is basically Starck's commonly used materials together with a streamlined mecha design.

Second one is just the mecha against a wave BG, which I cant really explain.

Comments in the shoutbox!

Preview for my final image

Character design has been finalised, it will be posed and made into an illustration for this course.

Stay tuned...

My Chosen Designer (My inspiration for this blog)

Image Retrieved from
http://www.cphart.co.uk/images/designers/Starck.jpg

Well, for starters, the designer who I'm referencing is Phillippe Starck. He is a famous French designer whose designs range from interior design to mass produced consumer goods such as toothbrushes, chairs, and even houses.

He was born in 1949 and started his career in 1968.

His Design Philosophy: "The designer can and should participate in the search for meaning, in the construction of a civilized world." — Philippe Starck

His Design Culture: New Design/ Industrial Design.

Design Style: He makes usable household items that are stylized, streamlined and organic in their look and are also constructed using unusual combinations of materials. Does not concentrate on creating provocative and expensive pieces.

Design Belief: He has a symbolic style that represents his beliefs about life and learning, this style works well in any given space because his creative side comes out most when he uses the space to create “a place” in culture.

As mentioned earlier, Philippe Starck has a strange habit of mixing different materials together when he is designing household products or furniture. This can be seen from a few examples which are listed here:

http://www.bonluxat.com/d/philippe-starck.html

Here are some examples:












As for my style, I like to add strong lines or forms to my designs, but Starck prefers to add lines only if it manages to streamline a design. I like to use very flat colors while coloring, while Starck prefers a glossy finish. This leads me to fuse the ideas of using strong lines and combining different materials together with his style of streamlining to form my blog image which will be elaborated on in the final post.

More Links here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Starck

http://philippe-starck.blogspot.com/

http://www.philippe-starck.com/

http://www.bonluxat.com/d/philippe-starck.html

My Art Style

First off: a link to my deviantart gallery and a few thumbnails. (Which are of low quality so i suggest you go to my DA page instead.)

http://nakamurashinji.deviantart.com/gallery/




I'll explain my art style now. As you can see from my more recent works, my art is mainly focused on strong shapes or detailed lines. Sometimes I use a lot of blue. My main typography style is usually futuristic (Bank gothic, Techno, Gadget, etc) or Grunge (Neoprint, Portugul TT, etc).

Usually the coloring is quite flat, but sometimes it can be soft as well. As for photography I love to do closeups for some strange reason.

Usually I don't really use blending options, but recently I found them to be quite useful.

That is all.
Stay Tuned...

After 1 Year... An update?!?

Yup, thats right folks. After one year of absence this blog will undergo regular updates.

(Although for school work, but I'll keep it active anyway even after the module is over.)

Next Blog entries will be school related.
Stay tuned...