This project taught me a lot in painting digitally as well as traditionally. I started out with poorly sketched drawings in photoshop which got better as you can see in this comparison:
It was extremly hard for me to get a feeling of the brush sensitivity. That’s why the first sketch is so blurry. The left sketch also took me a lot of time to draw where the right one took me only about 15 min.
I also got better in sketching in perspective thanks to the practice of the backgrounds that were inside.
I felt a huge improvement in painting digatally. Before starting this project I had almost no experience with painting with a drawing tablet. Here is a painting that I did a week before the project to illustrate my point:
I had no idea how to paint with the digital brushes and how to work with values. I watched a lot of tutorials to help me understand and started testing the brushes.
After my third background I would say I got a good feeling for painting digitally. It is maybe not that visible that I improved that much from the first painting to the last one but I really felt it. I was way faster and colors didn’t scare me that much anymore. I experimented a lot more and felt overall way more confident.
I also had a lot of fun painting the traditional illustrations. Even though I had experience with watercolors it was a challange for me because I had to copy the style of Chris. This taught me a lot about opening up to knew ideas. I usually don’t like stepping out of my comfort zone and loosening up from my inital idea so this was a great opportunity to experiment with that. I also felt that when I had to adjust my monsters. I learned that a group project is often letting go in order to have a better result.
Additionaly I learned a lot about maniging things. I planned my time a lot so would be the most productive and would finish earlier as I wanted to work on my other assignments. It was smart for me to do that as it was at the end still possible for me to help out Sanne. I tried to plan as well deadlines and just in general the time for our group but I noticed that that was quite hard for me. I hate confrontations and I know from previous projects that I can be quite submissive. In the end I noticed that I did the same mistakes again with my group. However I was able to manage the video for everybody at the end and was confronting when it came to the footage. Personally I learned a lot about myself in this project when it comes to teamwork. I think I will improve with time in terms of confrontation but I already felt like that I was less submissive. I often said what I didn’t like and gave critical feedback in order to improve our overall product.
All in all, this project was the perfect fit for me in terms of the tasks I had to do. I was able to overcome big challanges and I am very proud of that. As I would love to be a concept artist or illustrator later, this project really helped me to improve and to give me some great portfolio material.
Monster Project 