Game-U Art Zone: February 2021

2D Art: Foundations & Explorations

Composition is the word for this month for Game-U’s Foundations & Explorations students! They’re learning all about the principles of art and design, using sweeping spacescapes (which, uh, include chicken nuggets. In space. Yeah, I don’t know how that happened either) to learn all the different ways to balance elements! Then, they dove straight in to the three different types of symmetry – and put it all together to figure out how to use all of that to direct a viewer’s eye through their work in a way that holds the most interest. Amazing work, everyone! Keep it up!

2D Art: Design & Illustration

This month in Design & Illustration, it’s all about the characters! Instructor Courtney and his students have been focused on learning about character creation in the context of a video game. They’ve walked through building a base “skeleton” of a person with simple shapes, adding construction lines, and then upgraded to posing and classical figure drawing. The next step? Costume design, of course! They’re already learning about folds in clothing, how to add armor, and more! Get ready to see some awesome characters!

2D Art: Digital Techniques

Gesture drawing, timed drawings, underpaintings, character design, and chimera creation – you name it, and the Digital Techniques class has explored it!

To kick off the month, they started with timed drawings and gesture drawing challenges, where instructor Cat gave them five 1-minute drawings, three 2-minute drawings, two five-minute drawings, and one 10-minute drawing. (That’s a lot of timing.) The next week, they took those drawings, uploaded them into Krita, and used them as references to create their own previously-designed characters in a series of different poses! Later on in the month, for a riff on the character-design theme, students played an animal-and-element game, where each child was randomly assigned 2-3 animals, an element, and a plant, and, with the help of some research, had to combine three of those into one chimera creature! Check it out in the slideshow above!

Way to go, Game-U artists!