Where have I been?

Oh dear, I must admit I feel very guilty for my absence away from blogger. So what shall I blame? The Christmas break? The heavy work load? The constant astronomical amount of things to at home away from uni? All three put together? Well I cant and shouldn't moan, it could always be worse, I assure you, and i think the positive to take away from the previous paragraph, is, however little, I have been working nonetheless. So, i'll take this opportunity to share with you some work I completed over the Christmas break, skipping out a project or two (I will come back to them in later blogs. I'd began the vehicle design project at uni before we broke for Christmas but never managed to complete it before we moved on to other projects. My mind as it is, when we started the project I found it very difficult to come up with some concrete ideas with what approach I should take with it. I wont go into it all again, but the events of the last few years are still hitting hard, possibly worse now than it has been, which is ironic as everything is as good as I could of ever hoped for during the difficult time. I am now beginning to understand that even though the past is now starting to fade, the results it has left for me personally in terms of stress, worry and anxiety are still here and making it very hard to produce work to best of my ability, and sadly, making it hard to enjoy my work. What is getting to me the most though is the affect the past few years has had on my mind, my thought processes, my memory, my thinking. And so I can come back to beginning the vehicle design project. My mind is usually buzzing with ideas and excitement when we have a project like this, but not this time, my mind feels like it has a block on it, I'm coming up with ideas but they're not amounting to anything, I cant get my mind to turn them into the idea I want to run with and its frustrating. I have some ideas and I make sketches in my book. At first I wanted to do a huge industrial cargo train of the future, maybe part of an apocalyptic, science fiction work. Some of my sketches resemble a HR Giger style.

All too quick my enthusiasm for where the project is going is fading, I feel like what I'm doing has been done before, not original at all, and I see the work others are producing around me which all seems great and I just cant seem to get into it. I really have been losing my enthusiasm for what I'm doing lately, my passion for game art. This is all for another blog, but I'm really starting to struggle enjoying what I'm doing, and again it all goes back to the past few years. The stres is making me unbelievably tired and as a result unproductive. The project is put aside until the Christmas break. After being home for a week over Christmas I thought I better pick this project back up but again my mind is a blank and does just not seem to be doing anything. Aghhh! I decide I need to pick something and run with it, no matter what, just follow wherever it leads me and produce something of a final. I cant blame myself entirely, vehicle design is hard. Most concept art is easy, I could do that, just paint some fancy looking thing that looks cool. But that's not why I'm here on this course, and after the Vehicle Design lecture its obvious that a lot more needs to go into planning and concepting a vehicle design than meets the eye. The vehicle needs purpose, scale, form, surface quality. The vehicle must exist and resemble something that could physically work in a real world. It cant be propelled by magic, if its a land vehicle it will probably have wheels, if its a plane it will probably have wings. If its a plane it will definitely have wings. I decide to design a concept for a second space shuttle. It seems relevant, I believe NASA are currently looking into the design and workings of the second shuttle, and its something that has existed before so, considering my state of mind, it feels more accessible, as I can gather information on a variety of things such as form, shape, material, vehicle usage, colour and most importantly it's something I'm interested in anyway. So i begin to scribble some shapes down and then go into some more detailed sketches, thinking on one side about the design and how the vehicle would actually work and on the other hand trying to keep the idea quite conceptual (as far as I can take it).

I begin to question the design I’ve come up with. I have initially taken inspiration from large cruise liners and the movie Sunshine. I have also imagined that the Shuttle II will be used for manned missions to Mars. The design seems a little too far fetched and inconsistent with the first Shuttle design. So I decide to roll everything back again and begin to scribble, again. This time more refined, modern, bulky shapes, considering the first Space Shuttle design. When I begin to concept further I decide that I can begin to push the boundaries of the design a bit further to satisfy to conceptual outcome I hope to achieve at the end. I came up with a extravagant wing design that has a one piece wing and winglet that also surrounds the inner thrusters which looks quite cool. I also added a more science fiction, bubble type window to the front taking the idea from an astronauts helmet, with a gold glass.

All being considered I am actually very happy with the outcome of this project. I could argue that the final images where somewhat rushed together but they actually present themselves quite nicely. I will end the post with my final three images of my Shuttle II concept;