2D Design Portfolio

It's been a bit since I've posted anything, and today I'm going to do something a bit different. I haven't taken any classes that deal directly with designing or developing video games, but I am taking the prerequisites. Last semester I took 2D design. This semester I'm taking Drawing I, but that's a topic for another day.

Anyway, the following is some of my best work that came from this class. It was my first studio class, and it was tough in the beginning, but in the end it was enjoyable. Keep in mind I have no natural artistic talent (in the visual sense), and I had really no prior experience.

Since this is a video game related blog, I figured I would start with the one piece that had to do with video games. This is a "contemporary synthetic cubism" painting done on panels of matte board using gouache paint. I started by painting very abstractly onto a small piece of matte board using the assorted colors you can see, and then cutting it into pieces, and pasting it onto a larger piece of matte board. I then used stencils of words that I had created and painted over and within the panels.

The words are all related to a video game franchise called Halo. Spartan, ODST, Helljumper, Xbox, and the number 34. I can go on and on about the significance to Halo to me, so I'll leave that for another day.

This next piece is a watercolor painting focusing on an abstraction of Gothic architecture with an inclusion of gargoyles. This was the second painting we did in class (with the previous being the third and final), and I had an easier time with watercolors than I did with gouache.

This is the first painting we did, and it is a gouache painting with a focus on values. I had a hard time learning since this was the first painting I ever did, and I had trouble with the technique - especially the details and different values. However, I feel I did a very good job considering.

The last three pictures are from a series involving shapes and sharpie markers. We were instructed to make about a dozen sketches using squares or circles exclusively, following a central theme of a word, such as "direction". The first piece we did was to take our four best sketches and combine them in the above composition. The words I used, from left to right, starting at the top, are: cluster, asymmetry, symmetry, and direction.

The next one we were instructed to take one of our sketches and make a similar composition, but this time using the sketch and its mirror image into the four corners. This is my direction sketch; I really like how it came out, especially how you can flip it 90 degrees and it's almost completely different.

For the last one we were told to take one of our sketches and create a repeating tile pattern. I used my symmetry sketch. This one was the most time consuming of them all - especially since I had to shrink the original sketch down to half of its size and then repeat it 24 times.

All in all, it was a decent class. I learned to have fun with it and I made some friends. The shape series was probably my favorite due to its simplicity and focus on composition. I'm not much of a painter. The very last project we were working on was a perspective piece, but we never finished it because the semester ended. I really want to go back and finish it some day because I think it would turn out pretty cool. Plus, we were just working on perspective in Drawing, and it should help a lot.