Exhibition: Open 20th June- 4th July

For those who can't attend to my exhibition here's my little corner of my work

Sneak Peak of final character designs

So here are some more detailed images of my main fantasy character and the antagonist!

Recommended games

So by researching games the wonderful channel of youtube has been a great help in letting me see vloggers play video games to show you the sense of the storyline, the graphics and effects. As I lacked time and money to play the game myself I still had the same sense of video gameplay by watching someone else do it for me.
A few games that I loved and was deeply inspired by are:

Alice: Madness Returns

This psychological horror game was a massive influence on my story. I just love the wacky darkness of this game!

Dishonored


Looking at the political side of things in this game was a massive head spin when looking at the incredible character abilities.

Final Fantasy Series

Looking at the anime world this beauty has always been a pretty popular game choice for gamers

Devil May Cry Series


Playing this game as a kid I've always been stuck to the series- it's just so cool!!

Onimusha


Probably not so well known as it should be this old game gives an incredible insight of Japanese demon history with multiple different game endings- all depending on the player's decisions throughout the game.

Synopsis of Game

So if you weren't able to read the backside of my box cover design it roughly explains the story of the game.
My game is set in a soon-time future apocalypse where a girl, Hannah, and her younger sister Faith are evacuated to a run-down church house that once worshipped the souls of deceased loved ones.
However, trouble brews as they see restless ghosts and Faith is kidnapped by a soul. Following her sister into the Realm of the Dead, Hannah is disguised by a soul who throughout the game becomes her companion to look like she is a dead person. There she must fight her way and learn of the imbalance of both worlds to which she must save as well as her sister.

The box cover- IN THE FLESH!!

Here is a physical design of my box cover that I will be presenting in my exhibition later this week! Exciting!

Promotional Poster

Box Cover

Final Box Cover design for game with full body shot of fantasy main character plus an in-game shot

In-gameplay shot with life/soul bar

Sidekicks

Designing a soul-like character this will be my main character's sidekick.

Weapon Design

Influenced by the Devil May Cry series and Rusty Hearts I was influenced to use only Scythes as my design for my characters weaponry, as it would be applicable to the Death Realm she's in.

Costume Designing for fantasy character

Looking at famous films such as Avatar and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time it has influenced me for my character design.

Proposition for project

So I'm planning on creating a new game and be able to create a box cover, promotional poster and an in-game screenshot which will be on the box cover

Final Major Project- eek!

So my last project for my course is to create my own brief and write a 2500 word essay on it.
I'm basing my project on how illustration in gaming has developed throughout the years and so for my practical work I will design and advertise my very own game. This should be an exciting project as I may want to take my illustrative skills into the gaming world as a career!

Using Havard System

For my essay I will be talking about how illustration has affected gaming since the 70's.
Here are a two different sources I will use as a reference:
http://www.icheg.org/icheg-game-history/timeline/
http://catalogue.exe-coll.ac.uk/abl/
By using Neils Toolbox http://www.neilstoolbox.com/bibliography-creator/ I am able to reference my sources in the correct way for my bibliography. e.g. for the second source: Mark J.P. (ed) Wolf (2001). The medium of the video game. Austin: University of Texas Press. p8-9.

Ruining Famous Artworks!

Using Photoshop I can alter any image including artists' work

Here is a digital manipulation of Van Gogh's "The Starry Night"

Altering the hue/saturation 

And using a Filter 

How to use Photoshop

Opening a new layer: By selecting this button it will open a new empty layer.

Text tool: By selecting the T button you can click anywhere on the layer and a text box will appear

You can change the font and size by using the options bar at the top.

Using the Stamp tool enables you to dublicate certain parts of an image accurately. By holding Alt over the image you can click the part of your image you want to duplicate. Then by clicking in a different area of the layer it will duplicate the Alt'ed area.

e.g.

     

Brushes: To create images you can use a whole range of brushes for a mass variety of occasions

By selecting a colour and a particular brush type and its size you can create a whole range of styles and textures for your image.

Using the Hue/Saturation tool.

Playing around with the colour scheme for the hue and saturation I can alter the look of the original image.

And that's a few tools you can mess around with on Photoshop!

File types!

So when designing and researching for a project certain programs will use a different file type storage than any other program. Here are a few different file types that we use everyday in computing:

PSD: when saving a photoshop document it will normally have the title of the file and a .psd after. This means that it is the defult file extension of the file format of Adobe System's Photoshop program. You wouldn't be able to open this file without Photoshop being installed.

Here is an image that was manipulated on Photoshop. It would be saved as a psd file.

JPEG:  a file format which is used to compress digital images. The amount of compression can be changed; so if an image is high quality, it will take up a large amount of storage. If it is low quality, it will take up a small amount of storage. This is the most common image file format that you will see all over the internet and most other programs.

An example of a JPEG file with different compressions throughout this photo image.

TIFF: (Tagged Image File Format) is a container format for storing images, including photographs and line art and under the control of Adobe.The TIFF format is widely supported by image-manipulation applications, by publishing and page layout applications, by scanning, faxing, word processing, optical character recognition and other applications.It is a popular format for colour and B+W images.


PNG: (Portable Network Graphics) is a raster graphics file format that supports lossless data compression (e.g. an image without a background layer). PNG was created as an improved replacement for GIF. PNG was designed for transferring images on the Internet, not for professional-quality print graphics, and therefore does not support non-RGB color spaces such as CMYK.

Campaign Designs (Cinderella and Ariel)

Here are my digital designs for my campaigns. There is still alot of development to consider in terms of typography but this is what I've come up so far for my Disney Princesses.

Not a Disney fan..

So for my campaign design I'm going to base my subject on the Disney Princesses to make a shock factor to the audience's childhood memories. This I think will make my poster memorable and popular for the psychological effect it has on people's memories of the Disney Princesses. The reason I'm creating these designs against Disney is so that viewers will get the wake up call that not all relationships end with a "Happy Ever After".
Nowadays, domestic abuse is becoming a common problem amongst society and I want to be able to create a design (mainly towards a female audience) that they don't have to act like the dumb princess that falls inlove with the first man she sees-especially if she's in a domestic abuse relationship-but to have the guts to fight back and talk to people about it.
I feel particularly passionate on this subject as i think some childhood shows/movies give people the wrong idea about realistic life and relationships.

Telltale games-Super inspiration!

An independent online publisher founded in June 2004 it has published famous online games such as Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us (based on comic series Fables). Both these games stories are affected by both the dialogue choices of the player and their actions during quick time events.
The style and artwork based on these games is a huge influence on my design work for this particular project for its comical style. I also enjoy the games they create for their episodic story line and action packed scenarios.

Using Harvard System -(bibliography)

http://lucamarcenaro.daportfolio.com/gallery/159394

http://www.thewalkingdead.com/category/comics/

These sites have helped me with my design choice and research for my current project. Deciding to do a campaign on domestic abuse I had a mass range of ideas for it- one of which was inspired by the comic of "walking dead". As part of my FMP (Final Major Project) it is super essential that I reference my research.

New Project- Health Campaign ad

Portfolio

Have now uploaded a proper online portfolio onto Behance so have a look!-its mostly work I've already put on here.http://www.behance.net/search?search=sophie+meadows

Burn's Night- Final Design

PDF files

As a graphics student its super helpful if I understand a few of the mass variety of file types on a computer-one of which is PDF. Now a PDF (Portable Document Format) is a flexible file format for storing documents that have come from many different types of programs (e.g. JPEG or Photoshop). It allows to show images and stylised text so that the content of the document is not changed by the way that it looks which makes them print-ready. However, for this file type you have to download a PDF reading software such as; Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Reader and Foxit Reader.

Another few commisions

So after the Christmas holidays I have recently been commissioned for two posters for The Ring of Bells at North Bovey for a Guest Chef Night and a Burns Night.

Here's my final design for the Guest Chef Night poster

The owner had asked that I used a picture of the guest chef from a horror party where he had dressed up as a horror chef in a Looney Tunes barrier which I created myself.

Here's my draft design for the Burn's Night poster-it was very quick so I nicked a lot of the images from the internet just to have an idea of what it would look like. As Scottish shields are very symbolic and have meaning I wanted to design one that would be applicable to the area the pub is based in.