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As an illustrator/animator self promotion is essential to gain clients. Social networking can be useful but one of the best ways to display your work is to create your own website  with a gallery so potential clients get a glimpse at what you can offer them. The basis for my website design was my logo, which summaries my style. 

This is the website of a very influential illustrator called Mike Heald. He completed a degree in Animation and illustration at Bolton University and then continued on to create visually amazing apps such as Trench 2 (after years of hard work within design agencies building up his client base). I love the sleek technological appeal of his site and how simple it is to access to all the different areas of his work.

These are screen shots from illustrator Lucy Maddison’s website. Although I think syle of her work is nice I feel the website is too black and there are lots of gaps when you follow links through to gallery areas which looks quite visually dull.

This is Rob Anderson’s website, advertising his skills as an illustrator. I really like this design because it is simple and clean wit nicely drawn symbols for the links instead of just written links. I like the way his gallery page is laid out with a range of thumbnail circles, which reminds me slightly of Damien Hirst’s work. 

These are the final submissions of my Maya hamster in a range of angles. Overall I am pleased with the outcome but if I had more time I would like to have created a proper 3d background using Maya. Reading books was vital to complete this module, it was very difficult and totally unlike any software I had used before.

I changed the colour of the hamster following an online tutorial and then used photoshop cs3 to create the background as well as an image of just hay. I put the background on the y axis and the hay on the x axis to create the illusion of depth against the character.

I started by sketching a very simple hamster using basic shapes. Next, using polygon primitives as well as extrusion I began to shape the hamster. Altering vertices and faces also helped create the basic shape. I only created half of the hamster and used the mirror geometry tool to attach the identical other side of hamster. It is important that all the points are lined up and there are no missing faces or the mirroring won’t work.

The next module is to create an original character using Maya. I know absolutely nothing about Maya so to begin with I took out these books from the library. The one with the tiger on the front was very difficult to understand but the other had a step by step guide to creating a character with loads of tips.