Christmas Activity Summary

    I wanted to keep myself occupied over the holidays so I took the oppertunity to do a couple of personal projects. I had a bag of clay, some modelling wire and a finer wire so I constructed these models by first building a wireframe and then moudling the clay with the modelling wire.

    Shame there are a number of cracks in certain places. This was the result of the air-drying polymer clay that I used, some of which I patched up with small amounts of clay but for the most partthese were skillbuilding exercises. The sitting dragon was largely inspired by a form of minor mentioned in the book I got for Secret Santa (great book, has really invigorated me for the upcoming term but I swear I won't flood it with dragons).

    Boxing day I was without a laptop or my PC as I was around a relative's house. I decided to keep myself occupied by doing some sketching, admittedly most of this was from memory and there are plenty of anomolies to the horse anatomy I drew up such as the ribcage, the shoulder/bicep and the snout. I refreshed my anatomical knowledge with a visit to Oxford's Natural History and Ashmolean Museum where skeletons can be found (I also saw plenty of dinosaur skeletons) in the former and various sculptures and paintings of horses in the latter. One particular horse was a centrepiece of a room that was a cast bronze sculpture of Constantine I looking up at the sky while on horseback; examaining it I discovered the detail of the horse (rather humreously) included it's... rear opening to put it politely. Which logically would not normally be seen from most angles as it was largely obscured by the tail and I regret not having my camera on me for proof.

    I spent one evening writing a review of the rather controversial Prometheus, although despite being inspired by other reviewers of it, I did not add any quotes or references which should have been in there given the context. http://mstamp176.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/review-prometheus.html

     Final project I spent three days on a demonstrative digital painting of my dragons. For months I wondered about making a splash picture in vein of the promotional art for the champions of League of Legends although the final outcome is probably closer in feel to the landscape paintings of the Italian Renaissance. This could be a good thing as the Draconis have always echoed this period in history though their fashion, ideals, art and possibly personality. I wanted to use  the digital painting skills I had learned this term and so different ot my previous works, this started off as a greyscale composition

     Here is a buildup composition. I'm looking forward to the coming term as we move on to creating compositions.