Statement of Current Skills

Photoshop

I feel that Photoshop is my strongest asset and that it is the software that I feel most comfortable using. I like the fact that I am able to rectify mistakes within Photoshop much easier than I am able to in real life drawings and paintings, because it allows me to experiment with a piece of work in a way that is much more fluid in comparison to having to draw and erase real life work, which can be both time consuming and messy. The fact that you are able to also have a range of colours and different tools at your disposal at any time means that you are able to experiment with things that you may not be able to within drawings and paintings because of a limitation of not having certain equipment.

Here are some of the examples of where Photoshop helps me

The main thing I like about Photoshop is the ability to create things from the ground up through the use of layers. I imported my drawing of Snow White that I had as my initial layer. Then I was able to highlight selected parts of my drawing and colour them gradually. Highlights were used on raised areas such as cheeks due to the gradient tool, and I was able to add filters to enhance and desaturate certain colours to make them blend together better.

Photoshop was also very useful during my projects, because it allowed me to experiment with concept designs when I wasn't quite sure what I actually wanted to make. I used to fill tool to create silhouettes of potential buildings that I wanted to make, which allowed me to quickly make designs digitally without adding detail to them. I was able to create multiple silhouettes that allowed me to quickly create designs without actually finalising anything. 

Another thing that Photoshop helped with was editing sketches that were hand drawn. Once imported, I could clean up any pictures that I'd drawn, test colour schemes or add them to another piece of work to see how it would fit in to the overall environment. 

Maya

I feel that I'm getting slowly better with Maya over time. I came into previous projects not remembering a lot of things from last year using Maya, so there was a bit of an adjustment period where I had to re-learn parts of it. I feel I've learnt a lot from previous projects that I’ll be able to apply to the final major project which will be useful because I now have a better understanding of things such as UV mapping and creating more complicated shapes than I did before. I’ll be much better with Maya because I have looked up a lot of tutorials and I have gone out of my way to learn a lot of the things that I previously struggled with. As an example, in this picture I had to have a better understanding of creating models, because prior to this I had only created square and flat shapes that didn’t require much tinkering with to get the desired effect. With this environment I had to create street lights, which required me to create curled objects. I used to have problems with this, because I would pull a face or vertex one way, and the view of the same face or vertex from another angle would be messed up. Learning how to extrude properly really helped out with this, as it allowed me to create more complicated shapes without messing up certain pieces or having to combine multiple objects that may not be the perfect fit together.