Looking back on my first year on Game Art I feel like a changed person both in my art and my work ethic, I now realise there really is not time to mess around and have breaks whenever your feeling a little lazy, as Chris has told us many a time throughout the year, being good at art requires hard graft and he was not wrong there. I believe my work has progressed and its overall quality has improved as far as technical aspects are concerned, I'm not as good as I would like to be at this point and plan on doing extra work over summer to improve my basic drawing skills as well as my digital art. My weight of line still needs a lot of work.
When it comes to the 3D side of the course I would like to believe I have improved a great deal considering this time last year I had never even touched 3DS Max or UDK, looking back at projects like the wheelie bin and house in comparison to the quality of the Tree project is rather shocking, my textures are blurry, unwraps inefficient but now this has changed. I do feel as far as the 3D work goes more class time with Heather and Simon would be extremely valuable considering the steep learning curve of this area of the course, I realise this may not be possible though due to their busy schedules and thats why we have the labs so we can ask second and third years for extra help, but I did notice that some of my year were afraid to ask the other students for help, and sometimes you feel bad for pestering them when they are busy with workloads more demanding than our own. This is my only real issue with the course other than that everything has been great and everyone is really nice and friendly.
For the critical studies area of the course I have found that with my blog entries I have begun to develop my own writing style and I do enjoy writing entries, I've even done a few extra ones just because I felt like writing something. I really enjoyed doing my presentation and feel it was a good first effort and with more work on professional presentation I'll be sorted because I have never had a problem with talking in-front of groups of people so I pretty much have the verbal side of it down.
On the whole I feel my first year went well, not without it's fair share of sleepless nights and hick-ups but that's how you learn I guess, practice makes perfect, now all I have to do is make sure I'm perfect by October this year and everything is plain sailing..... shouldn't be so hard right?
