Its 3am- and I'm so screwed...

Its 3am and this is the first blogpost I've made in three months, I'm behind on about 12-13 blog posts and I'm really damn scared. I mean I brought this on myself, and in hindsight I've shot myself in the foot, I actually enjoyed doing blogposts but something happened along the way, well alot happened really...

I knew the second year blues were bad but oh man I didnt think I was this behind on the blog.

Its time to catch a wake up and, hell I'm actually on the verge of tears as I'm writing this. I cant even ask for help here like- Hell I dont know what to do. I recieved a call from someone, over this past weekend, someone claiming to be from the university essentially telling me I'm going to fail the course and holy hell I basically shat myself. At the time of writing this it seems the call was fake, the question is how they got my number and how do they know I do Game Art, I didnt recognize the voice and the number was withheld but regardless, the call fake or not was a godamn wake up call. I feel like writing this because I felt like I should get my thoughts down on paper, or at least somewhere. I know the blog is supposed to be this really professional place to record and reflect on my work, so I'm going to reflect on what the hell I've been doing and how the hell I'm going to fix my current situation because at the moment I feel like I'm in no-mans land at the moment with not alot of places to run so this is going to be more for personal piece of mind and its going to be an honest and if somewhat informal way of me trying to figure out a plan, so please forgive any foul language or spelling errors. So lets start from the beginning: The last blog post I made was about trying to get the turret to fire its rounds, I got it to turn and rotate but it never got around to firing correctly for some reason, the bolt which I had made just never left the models barrel, so essentially the turret was the last thing I made and finished correctly. I ended up needing a week extension because I caught pneumonia over new years and that was a hellish experience, I legitmately thought I was going to die some nights (It wasnt that bad in the end, didnt need hospitalisation just alot of antibiotics). But thats what happens when you have a horrible diet, poor sleep and severe stress. Again all of it could have been avoided if I just frigging kept a proper schedule, I'm terrible at making and keeping to schedules it seems. Schedules just dont seem to work for me, so I could bang my head against a brick wall and make another schedule or find another way to remedy my time management problems. At the time of writing this I've basically gotten into the habit of coming into labs at 10:00 doing coursework and Off the Map stuff with my team (4 of which live with me) and then doing personal work at sometime after 17:00, I usually leave at 21:00 everyday, but make sure I fit some personal work in there just to keep my sanity. (To clarify by personal work its not just portfolio related stuff, its personal drawings, models and pieces of writing or game design ideas, I want to be a successful developer, I want to share stories with other people and I'm always working on something).

A personal piece, basically a Fantasy styled wizard who is also a medieval city guard. I did this first off as a doodle but then looked up some techniques used by an artist called Even Mehl Amundsen, and I tried applying them and I created probably one of my best pieces of character art and rendering right here... But at the time of writing this I cant replicate it, I'm using the same techniques but I just cant get the same level of rendering and skill represented in one of my paintings and it frustrates the absolute hell out of me... Its actually held me back from doing my presentation pieces because I'm spending most of the damn day trying to get the above image.

Like what the hell are these?? These were painted after the wizard painting and they look like a dogs breakfast, the colours are muddy, the lighting is boring and has no depth and the proportions look like hell. Like what the ever loving shit...

Maybe I'm trying to hard to force a design, trying to force a painting?

So I'm trying to repaint the damn design, change it completely to what the model and original design were (The aboce image is a Work in Progress by the way) and I'm still having a terrible time with this thing, something isnt working and I cant figure it out!

I've rambled off track, at this point whicever tutor was reading has probably stopped... Doesnt matter, this is for me, right?? Okay so plan of action time: 1: Accept that the hunter's design is fundamentally flawed and will need a complete change of plan after the presentation is finished, accept that I will probably need to re-do the character project over summer. 2: Finish up the last few remaining blog posts regarding the turret, should be at least 1 or two more. 3: Do every single blogpost regarding the character project; 3.1- What you started with and how you got the idea, what was the initial plan

3.2- Sources of research, what research was I looking at, what drove me to make the character look this way? 3.3- Modelling, what took so long and what made it take so long to the point finishing the project was difficult, what can be improved and what did I learn?

3.4 - The aftermath, a post mortem and how the hell can I fix it.

4: Start blog posts on Off the map project.

4.1 the beginning, the team the initial idea.

4.2 My role in the team and why I volunteered for said role (character artist/concept artist)

4.3 Modelling and applying the stuff I learnt from the character project

4.4 Working with others and presentations

4.5 Texturing, my bane and how the hell I'm going to tackle it.

Okay so how the hell do I do all of these blogposts before the end? Well heres my strategy: 1: Do a blogpost everyday for the next two weeks, hopefully this should bring me up to date and hopefully not seem like a rushed and hurried attempt at salvaging my place on the course.

2: Seriously reflect on what went wrong, I want to specialise as a character artist as I believe my strength lies in that area, why the hell did I muck it up so badly.

3: Talk to Chris about it, what kind of remedies can I make to my grade and to my portfolio.

4: Eat vaguely healthy and avoid the new domino's that just opened up right outside labs. 5: Sleep normal hours.

Right, so I've already screwed up the last two parts of that strategy by staying up till 4am and eating pizza from that dominos that just openend up outside of labs... Fuck...