*sigh*

So, not feeling particularly fond of what I'm doing at the moment. Had a sweatbox today and, while being very helpful in critical parts of the work, it was also a little confusing from a students point of view. I'm struggling with the style of my Buffy characters at the moment, as the simplified shapes is just not how I draw usually, and I think they're plain and well, ugly really. I mean, Willow and Buffy I mainly like, but the whole set is just no where near where I want it. Usually I'd go for a much more human-esque look, but tutors and fellow students all said they really liked my shape-based designs, and I thought I was on the right track. Yet in the sweatbox, they just said they didn't work at all and they simply didn't like them. It's annoying because I already hate them lol and I can see why they don't like them because I feel the same, and it's been a frustrating process just getting the designs this far. Sometimes I just don't know what I'm supposed to do. Sitting down and typing this helps my thoughts get into some sort of order, and I see now I haven't gone far enough in making the characters work as stop-mo designs - I forget that, as models, they can be detailed, complicated and intricate, like the work I've always loved, as long as they are buildable. I've been lost and just drawing for the sake of it, instead of really thinking about how I want these pieces to look.

I'm going to step back from what I've been doing and really look at how the characters are and how I want them to be portrayed - I do like the shape-based design, but on top of that I think there's a lot of room for a very stylised pen look, bringing back my Burton and Gorey influences, and then painting them up a lot in ArtRage or Photoshop in a very 3D manner, to try and get that Stop-Mo feel. I've such a long way to go, and I don't even want to do this area of work, so it's hard to keep motivated, but meh, let's just get on with it -_-

On the plus side, I'm enjoying my Star title sequence stuff and using ArtRage is fun - a lot more traditional feeling and the look is really lovely :) I'm doing some interesting Collab stuff for a 3rd year too - backgrounds using a lot of texture, and one using scraperboard, which will be great fun to do :)

Other than that, I've been honing in on the areas I enjoy - fixing and colouring animation in Toon Boom is something I really want to work more in, so I'm really looking forward to doing Sian's film, and learning more about sequential art and comic books too, because that's where I want to go: sequential artist (storyboards, comics, graphic novels, webcoms etc) and Toon Boom colouring ^_^ do NOT want to be a character/background artist, I'm just not good enough and I don't have the passion lol

Oh well, moan over, back to work!