IMPATHIC: PERSONAL BRANDING AND ALL THAT JAZZ

Capstone Portfolio: Spring 2024My self authorship project, I decided, was to create my own personal brand and begin content creation as an online artist. This includes making a streaming package, a manageable Society6 store, and social media. At the moment, this is ongoing and will continue past graduation. I will be updating and adding to this brand regularly, and have Impathic be my at-home business.

Sketchy, my mascot character or 'sona' to put it simply, is a characterized representation of myself to use instead of just my webcam. That preference is for self-expression, presentation, and privacy. Sketchy has existed in many forms previously, and it's a concept I've been trying to build on for years. It's been an aspiration of mine since I was a teenager to run something like an Etsy or Ko-Fi, stream, and make a name for myself as an artist through this avenue of social media. It's fun to be able to express myself in this way, and share the art I like to make with an online audience.

STAGE ONE: WORKFLOW AND RENDERING PRACTICE

Independent study: Fall 2023I entered this study with the goal of building my skillset as a concept artist, and as a character designer. This study had a focus on character design, structural drawing with value, and making character concepts that would be usable in a studio setting. Originally, the final product was to be a full portfolio of concept art including object, character, creature, and background design. To adjust for time constraints, my scope was pulled back to character concepts. The efforts made in my studies have helped improve the quality and workflow of my digital illustrations, and rethink how I approach design problems in multiple mediums.

STAGE TWO: THE ERI PROBLEM (CHARACTER CONCEPT REVISION)

Eri is an interesting case. She is a character I had created a semester prior to this study, and I was never quite happy with her design. It always felt disconnected and a jumble of stray elements or ideas. Although I could paint a pretty picture, her color scheme, facial features and details, and key elements always were inconsistent or never quite right. So, I used her as my first "test run" to compare my understandings of character design from before and after this project.

STAGE THREE: CHARACTER KEY ART

A pre-existing set of 5 characters were used in stage 3. At this point, I wanted to achieve being able to create a set of character concepts that would be able to exist within the same world and be stylistically cohesive. I chose my TTRPG Campaign's party since we had just finished our game, and I treated this as a send-off celebration. This would be creating a set of 5 character "key art" pieces that showed each character in an action pose, and incorporate elements like particle effects and details like weaponry or terrain. This section is ongoing after the time window for the independent study.

FINISHED SETS: INGRIS AND KAY

ADOBE CHARACTER ANIMATOR: BOBBLIN D. GOBLIN

Kinetic Design and Animation: Spring 2024This was an assignment during March to collaborate with a partner to create and animate a newscaster type character, with an original script and puppet it in Adobe Character Animator. The project's main focus was to practice lip syncing and using the software and its functions. Displayed here is my share of the work, and a documentation of my difficulties with the software's limitations.

WORKING WITH CONSTRAINTS

There were three different takes of the script recorded for us by my significant other. Two different "goblin-y" voices, and one with a comically deep and masc voice. We were told that the first two would be unusable for the project by our professor because they'd be hard to understand, and that we needed to cut a large portion of the script, including the explosion. Sadly, the explosion was too technically advanced for this level of work, apparently.The same day I needed to share an important file to my partner, a severe storm in the area knocked out our power and our road was closed. I'm in a forest with terrible cell service and rely on WI-FI for everything. So, you can see how badly this went. Some file corruption, driving out in the storm to get gas for our backup generator, and a moment of luck in a Giant parking lot later, I got the necessary files shared for them to submit in time. However it turns out we had to restart because Bobblin's puppet file got severely corrupted from the power outage.I had gone into this project with the assumption that the rigging parameters and workflow would be identical or exactly the same as within Live2D.Oh, I was so wrong. The behaviors tags and how they function are entirely arcane to me, and this does not even include how scenes function or set up. This meant a lot of trial and error, debugging, and rigging on the fly to minimize the model breaking with the live motion capture. To my understanding, there still isn't really a way for me to prevent such situations, and it's easy to break models like so:

WAYFINDING: SHILLINGTON FARMER'S MARKET

Information Design: Fall 2023This assignment was my final project for the Information Design course. I had done on-site research for a location of my own choice, instead of the prescribed science hall building on Millersville campus. This farmer's market is a place I'd love to visit more often, and I thought it would benefit from some better signage. I focused on assigning ways to differentiate each entrance, a wall mounted bathroom sign, and a landmark sign for the community area and restaurant.

CREATED ASSETS

PERSONAL WORK:
LIVE2D AND ILLUSTRATION

ILLUSTRATION & CHARACTER DESIGN

ART TEAM PORTRAIT CREATION AND MANAGEMENT 2023

A portion of giving back to the volunteers that contribute to our event and show running is to create illustrated portraits of their player characters. As Art Director, I distribute the workload amongst the art team by number of games evenly, and we spend the month of April or sooner drawing them on schedule. This is a sample view of last year's Trello board to manage progress.

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