New Portfolio - Progress

CTNX is fast approaching and I've been wrapping things up on my new portfolio pages. As I've been adding the last few pieces in, and plowing through a long list of edits, it's really cool to see it all starting to take shape. I've learned so much this year and have been blessed with time to really focus on finding a better personal process. It's been a lot of practicing, studying and experimenting but I feel like I'm starting to narrow down what works best for me and the best part is that it's giving me a clearer picture of the techniques/fundamentals to prioritize when I'm practicing. Maintaining momentum on this has been much easier with two good friends at my side. Shaun Bryant, Keith Zoo and I decided to work on a common concept so we could more easily riff, critique each other and brainstorm solutions when we got stuck.

The following images are a peak at some of the costume blue sky process. In our loose concept we had 4 main cultures. Futuristic tourists/space travelers ("Mobi Tours") and 3 prehistoric cultures on the planet they visit. Only some of this goes into the actual portfolio so I thought I'd share the approach I used for these on the blog. I really enjoy creating variations on a theme, so coming up with cuts/shapes that repeated within a culture, while maintaining a range of styles was really fun. You can see that I just reused the bodies for time's sake and there are still some edits here and there. Not worried about getting too detailed on these though since the purpose of these explorations was to just feel out the possible differences between the cultures and to create some general guidelines for myself moving forward.

My initial mood boards were just secret pinterest boards but I've included some of the revised location mood boards I created (after the culture concept pages were done). Looking back, pinterest was handy for gathering images but it's better for me to create a traditional board even in the blue sky stage. It can still be exploratory but putting it all on one clean document/wall forces me to edit earlier and keeps the designs tighter from the beginning. I found that I'd have to dig to recall an image I had wanted to use and it wasted time/killed momentum. I also had a clearer story in mind for these at this point since I eventually molded the loose "prehistoric tour" theme into a take on Swiss Family Robinson. After working out more of the story it was much more organic to edit the boards down. Just further validates that "Story is King".

I throughly enjoyed making these and I hope you enjoy them.
Swiss Family Robinson designs coming in the next post...