Thesis Wrap up

Alright, well.... this week will be extremely busy. Thesis is due by 9AM Monday morning and I am in the final stretch of pretty much everything I've started. I'll be at the school all day, everyday for the next week. First let's start with my Business card:

Front

Back

Designing that was a fun little project, I have never had a business card, let alone a personalized one. The other things I got done tonight were some backgrounds that will be framed in my exhibit space. What I did was pull some frames from the animation and then expanded on them to fill out the dimensions:



And finally, I spent all of yesterday putting up my Senior Thesis Exhibition Space:

Installing

SUCCESS!!

I am about 85-90% done with everything, just need to wrap it all up in one fine package stamped with Ben McNulty approval!

- Ben

PSA

- Ben

Thesis Spot

So far we have been assigned our space for thesis and yesterday we got the go ahead to start the installation part. This is my sketch that has slightly changed upon installation but gets across the same message. I realized how big I was actually going to have to print everything to fill the space so I rearranged the set up to my left wall. Instead of having four concept pieces and two background I decided two concept pieces and one background (it'll be one framed piece but have three backgrounds in it) would be a lot easier.





These are just a rough plan to follow and an extremely rough tape-out in the gallery (ran out of regular masking tape, switched to black). Next is actually printing and framing my work then putting everything up.

-Ben

Sand Hound

For my fantasy art class we had to pick 6 characteristics that an animal would have and make up a creature. The characteristics included 1 movement, 2 offensive, and 3 defensive traits. I ended up picking "climbing" for movement, "acid" and "speed" for offense, and "secretion", "camouflage" and "web" as my defense. I sat down and started to think.

It was really hard to get started on this project by any means. It was like all my creativity was drained out of me, I didn't understand. Once I got into this project next thing I knew it was 17 hours later and I have literally created a creature based off those six attributes from scratch. I went into thinking about how it behaves and after looking at different reference of other animals (snakes, big cats, gorillas, bears) different characteristics started to come about. I started molding this creature into real life going as far as differences between opposite sexes, how they are pack hunters and family oriented to how their skeletal system is built and what possible organs they might have as well as informational boxes explaining some of the animal's characteristics.

I present to you a Sand Hound:



Now, the next part of this project is to take your creature and pit it in a fight to the death with another classmates creature of your choosing. This part sounds like a lot of fun! But again, I am having issues starting it. the layout and positioning of the animals is giving me the most trouble. I need a shot that is more dynamic than what I have been drawing so I haven't settled on a composition just yet. Hopefully, like this creature layout, it will all just come to me and I will have a new piece by the end of the week.

The creature I decided to pit my Sand Hound against was my classmates, Anna Zotta, Mountain Creeper. They are similar in size, anatomy and their native terrains can co-exist. Here is what her Mountain Creeper looks like:

*Mountain Creeper(c) is copyrighted by Anna Zotta

Look for the fight to begin soon!

-Ben

Thesis, Thesis, Thesis!

This is the time when it comes down to the final rounds. Thesis is four weeks away and I still have a bit to do but I am in a comfortable spot I think. All these sleepless and late nights I've pulled will all be worth it in the end. I need to also set up character sheets of all my sketches to get ready to present for the show. I plan on getting all these images framed as well.

I am currently creating some show-work to put around my thesis spot in the last two days. It all started with this movie poster:



We had to create a poster for our short, paid for and displayed by the school to raise awareness of each individual TBM project. A background I created before and intended to use for one of my scenes got cut on the fact that it didnt match quite well with my color palette (too green and my short is at night so it needed more of a blueish tone: Original Background Here ). So I decided to actually use it for a promotional photo and added to it. the result was the picture on the Movie Poster. What got me next was I couldn't think of how to title the piece. I knew what it was called but I didn't know what the title would look like. After trying a few varieties for looks I ended up taking a bit of inspiration for other name brands I've seen such as games like Pokemon and Final Fantasy to thinking about what type to hand trace and change up a little bit.

Which lead me to creating this logo for my thesis short:



This is what was given to me as far as a spot goes in the gallery and to tell you the truth I am very happy with it. Three walls, two corners, across from the lovely Dana Joy Jacobsen and the perfect size? Can't complain all. Today I am going to go up and measure everything out so I know how big to print my images off. I also plan on getting my business card and personal logo done today and then it would leave me with wrapping up my animated piece for the rest of the semester until we get permission to start hanging things.

This is what I have to work with:



There will definitely be more things uploaded on here as I begin to wrap everything up and finish things. Look for more soon!

- Ben

Old Flash

Just trying to get some of my older work up on the interwebs...

Enjoy

-Ben

Instagram

Instagram is now available through web browsers. Check out The Moments of My Life:

http://instagram.com/benji_mac/

- Ben