Christmas & New Tablet

So the reason for my late update is because of Christmas, being busy with family and everything. But for Christmas I got a new Monoprice Tablet, and it works great so far! So now that I've got a new tablet, I can finally get back to being productive and get some digital art done.

"Lord of Pride"

My friends and I did a Secret Santa Exchange. So I drew Tara's character, Lucy. This was the first piece I did when I got my new tablet.

"Is This... Really the End...?"

A quick digital piece I did before I got my new tablet. This is Ted, when he is about to disappear.

"Pubby and Friends Christmas"

A Christmas present I made for my brother of Pubby and his friends.

"Colored Pencil Sketches"

A whole bunch of sketches I've done so far over winter break. I've found my love for colored pencils. I almost feel like I can't sketch in any medium but them now that I've become so attached to them.

"Squall Gestures"

Some practice digital gestures; I drew Squall (from Final Fantasy VIII) in all of the poses for these gestures though.

"Gesture Practice"

A bunch of gestures done mostly using figure drawing sites; some is from life though. I've done these pretty much every day of break so far. Some were done while referencing the Vilppu Drawing Manual. Others were done during drawing sessions Jinny and I had together.

First Semester of Sophomore Year: Completed!

So I just finished up my first semester of sophomore year this past Friday. It was a very busy semester, as you can probably tell from the recent posts I've been updating with. I haven't even had a chance to really upload anything not for my Design for Media class since early October. Now I'll be uploading everything else that I've done in my other classes and in my free time. Enjoy my massive update:

"Neuro's Evil Torture"

This was my gift for the Secret Santa Swap that the Animation and Illustration Collectives did at my school. I had a lot of fun with this and I really started to realize how much more I enjoyed using Painter Tool Sai after working on this.

"Abra's Concentration"

A piece I did for the Illustration Collective at my school. This was also one of the first pieces I finished in Painter Tool Sai.

"Light Festival Massacre"

This animatic starts out with the protagonist, Benedict, standing outside of a large, fancy building. Benedict's mission is to assassinate Harrison. He faces his arch-enemy Blaine in a race to kill the target. As he runs through the masquerade, he is not only faced with his mission, but he also comes across a woman named Kali. This was my final animatic for my storyboarding class.

"Entering The Link Between Worlds"

Music Interpretation animatic for storyboarding class. This is basically about the beginning of The Nays. The Nays find themselves in a mysterious new place known as The Link Between Worlds. They are faced with many obstacles that they must overcome.

"Return to Muko Inc."

Ted and Doge come across a mysterious box in warehouse. They decide to return the box to Muko Inc. because they think that the owner would like it back. Once they push it outside, it is revealed that there is Lotus, a slave boy, inside the box. Lotus seeks their help, but they are scared off and retreat. This was my final for my Animation I class. We had to make a 20 second animation about pretty much anything.

"Eather's Banjo"

This was my first time animating to sound. We chose a sound clip out of a select few, and this was the one that I decided to go with. It's from a clip of MLP:FiM with Pinkie Pie. So this animation is really rough since we weren't given all that much time to come out with a finished piece. In fact, he wanted us to keep it rough in order to focus more on the movement rather than an actual finished animation. So this is my character Eather, since I figured this clip was close enough to her voice.

"Marker Sketches"

This was my first time using markers, so I did some experimenting with mixing colors to start it off. Jinny gave me a quick demo on how to use them.

"Colored Pencil Tests"

This semester I started experimenting with more various mediums in my sketchbook, thanks to Jinny. These are some tests that I did using colored pencils.

"Sketches of Me"

So I was trying to figure out how to draw myself. I couldn't really get the right style or way to draw myself though, even after this many attempts. Drawing myself accurately and stylistically is a lot harder than I thought.

"More Sophomore Sketches"

A whole bunch of various sketches from throughout my first semester of sophomore year. The majority of these are my characters, but at the very bottom there are a few sketches of Abra and Missingno.

"Gesture Practice"

A bunch of practice gesture drawings I've done throughout the semester.

D4M: Final Post!

So I finished up my final for Design for Media class today.

I created a website that compiles together all of the work that I have done on this project. You can check it out here.

Shadechat Preview from Michelle Rakar on Vimeo.

Backgrounds

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D4M: Starting Up Backgrounds

This week I worked a lot on the concepts for the final backgrounds. These will be all of the main backgrounds that show up in the game, since they are the main areas visited. I also tested out some concepts for coloring the backgrounds; I'm most likely going to stick with the second style.

Background Sketches:

Background Color Concepts:

 

This coming week I will be focusing on finishing up these backgrounds, putting together the graphical user interface. The final compiling will be started as soon as those portions are completed.

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D4M Final: Character Development

So I decided to change my overall schedule and focus on the characters for this week. So I'm pushing back all of the background work to next week; I also plan on having actual finalized color palettes next week. This week I worked on the character expression sheets. All of them have been completed as seen below:

Ralphie Ragger

Adrian Ragger

Scott Ragger

Celia Ragger

Kharen Ragger

Zandra Saku

Terra Gaea

Mar Keys

Natalia Hanes

Abi Lane

James Bowens

Charles Houston

Kieran Price

Shade Chance

Here is the updated chart:

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D4M Final: Week 1

So it's the second week into the final project for my Design for Media class. This week my goal was to create the full storyline and some character and background sketches.

Storyline

Ralphie, a high school boy, discovers an online chatroom known as Shadechat over the summer after his Aunt Kharen's death. Ralphie is the son of a well-known detective, Adrian Ragger.

Shadechat is a chatroom in which someone talks to an anonymous person, and it is not known who or where they are from (absolutely no IP addresses are saved or anything, and it is impossible to trace the person talking). This site is basically set up where it will randomly pair two people up to talk. Once someone logs out, the other is not notified, it just immediately redirects them to a new person. Word spreads that the people on the site are from the dead. The site is connected to the spirit world.

After a few times of using the chatroom, Ralphie eventually decides to try and communicate with his Aunt Kharen after reading through his dad's unsolved cases in his office. He finds out some information from her and decides to try and solve this unsolved case.

Ralphie eventually ends up talking with some new people on Shadechat and even meets with a couple of them in person at some points. Natalia and Abi are the two who Ralphie talks with most often. At first, Ralphie's friends do not believe him. Eventually, his friend Zandra decides to use the site. After some time, she eventually goes missing and Ralphie and his friends must figure out her whereabouts.

I have established more of the storyline, but I will avoid spoiling the entire game.

Character Sketches

Some basic character sketches. None of these are very finalized, they're all still just planning out ideas for the characters presented throughout the game.

Here are a bunch of digital sketches for the mugshots. I plan on finalizing these a lot more and adding whole expression sheets within the next couple of weeks.

I also made a basic size chart of the silhouettes of all of the characters that appear.

Here's a basic layout of what I imagine the game screens to look like. There will be a drawn out background, a character mugshot, a text box, and the date and time of day in the top right corner.

Background Sketches

I did some basic floor plans for all of the major areas that are presented throughout my storyline. Since this is a detective game with an ongoing mystery, it will take place all within one small town: North Harbor.

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