A new pic and a challenge? 2004-03-24 - By Kris Krieger
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At 12:16 PM 23-03-2004, John Gaubatz wrote:
>Hi Ed,
>Your tacks look good. I sometimes tend to overlook what makes a scene,
>instead I think complex scenes and end up not finishing anything. : p
Scene vs components - I think in terms of Scene also - overall landscape
design first, so to speak, with general ideas of color and texture etc.,
individual components later. THen handle the components. Generally,
overall concept first, then details. Other people think ddetails first
then try to put them into a scene.
Neither is "right" or "wrong" - just a matter of different people
approaching things (?incl life?) in differnet ways. The good thing about
setting up "weekly challenges" for yourself is mainly to practice certain
things so that you learn to do them by habit. It's a lot like an artist
practicing making "squiggly lines" with different paintbrushes or, for that
matter, like a musician practising arpeggios and chords and so on. IOW,
the components become second nature, and then, when you want to paint a
full picture or play a complex peice of music, yo can do it more
spontaneously, from the heart so to speak, rather than having to peck
around and figure out all the details along the way.
IOW, the point of a weekly project is not (IMO at least) merely to "finish
something". It's to practice as above, sothat you can get to where you can
finish somehting you want to keep.
OTOH, other folks (i.e., yours truely) are better with "learning by
doing". Jump in all the way and learn as they go along. IOW, for me, if I
don't have a view of the strategy, I can;t learn the tactics because they
make no sense, and appear to me like a senseless jumble of meaningless
tasks. ((Which BTW is why I personally learn better on my own than I can
in school - the vast majority of classes are taught by simply presenting
you with various tasks, and for me, they make no sense, because they are
not connected to anything, therefore I remember very little of
anything.)) The "task-otriented" method also BTW is why there have been,
and prob. still are, so many people who learned, for example, to "use Word
for Windows", yet don;t know how toeven start using any other Windows
application - they learned specific tactics, not strategies.
Again, ti just depends on the individual. Different people learn better
this way, others learn better that way, and so on. Many people do fine
with the "task-oriented method. It's just that there are different paths
to the same destination.
Re: people looking for suggestions of thingsto model, I think what it is,
is that they're asking the wrong question and of the wrong people. What I
think the real question is, is one they actually need to do is ask
themselves, and that question is, "what sorts of things do I care enough
about, or enjoy enough, to spend the time modeling them?" IMO that's the
key. Many poeple just like modeling for its own sake, and I think that
weekly challenges are good for them. Other people are just different and
need to be "inspired", i.e. need to find what it is they want to "say", so
to speak. So, a weekly challenge like, "model your watch" might not work
for them,. but something more abstract, such as, model a scene that uses
red in contrast with white" might be better for them. A lot of people do
enjoy weekly challenges, and I think the, well, challenge of coming up with
a challenge is to changeit around like, that, ie., something specific this
week, somethign abstract next week, maybe something from the news another
week, somethig historical a different week, and so on. Or, have different
categories of challenges, to appeal to a wider audience.
Actually, I think one of the main difficulties with the Caligari contests
are that they are not categorized, so the judges have to pick between a
huge variety of styles and subjects, and then the people sometimes get
upset because they don't understand how one was selected and not
another. It's easier to compare thing sof similar style - scifi to scifi,
character to character, etc.
SO, no conclusions, those are just some thoughts i had.
- Kris
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