End of Year Review

As a whole I'm generally pleased with my game art course. There's been a wide range of areas focused on throughout the first year like drawing fundamentals, 3D modelling basics, recording design and thought processes, life drawing, character design and environment design. To be honest, I've covered so much I apologise if I've missed anything. It's been quite tough dealing with the work load at times but I always knew I had a mountain to climb when signing up to the course.
The two main aspects I have enjoyed so far is the character and environment design. I'm a creative person so the research and designing suits me really well. Something I particularly struggled with in these tasks, oddly was the huge amount of freedom we had. I find it a lot more constructive to have set restrictions so that my mind doesn't wander too much during the design process. So for me I would like to see some more constraints put in place for future design projects on the course, similar to the way 3D projects have a range of constraints.
I would also like to see a bit more emphasis on environment designing. The project that covered this was the one I found the most engaging and interesting to cover. So much so that it has kind of swayed me to want to focus on this area as I break into the games industry.
I have found the design tips and examples of design really useful in my critical studies sessions. It brought my attention to the small details that designing something like a character needs to make it a success especially when it comes down to how they are posed, clothing that fit them to the game etc. These are aspects that I take on board now when I design, taking on a slight graphic design role, making my characters more interesting. I definitely focus on silhouettes a lot more as a result of this because I think it's a good tool that gives you a good idea on whether a character will be eye catching and interesting to look at. I often get my flat mates to crit my designs during the design process to help me get a better understanding of what players of games want in a character or environment. This idea came to me from the great social network account that the course encourages students to leave feedback and view others way of working on. I also like the way that projects we get set encourage us to try things that we aren't particularly good at or never even experienced before. For example I have never used sculpey but I gave it a go for a character project and to be honest it turned out to be a complete disaster but I learnt from it and doing things like this build up a habit of teaching yourself things rather than relying on others which I think is a good mentality to install into us early on.
My passion is drawing, so for me as much as the course gets me to draw and express ideas then it can't go wrong in my opinion. I have learnt a lot from the first year and I am looking forward to what we will cover in the years to come.