Cardiff International Comic & Animation Expo

You can see my Pixie costume's progress:
 Part 1,  Part 2

It's been a while since my last post. I've been busily doing my major project, and now I'm preparing my first ever cosplay costume for CICAE (Cardiff Comic & Animation Expo) on 25/26th Feb. Rather excited and anxious at the same time. I'm cosplaying Pixie from X-men.

 

One of Shane's sketches: Alpha Legion Concept

I had planned to go way back in December, but coincidentally some lecturers at my university department decided it would be a great idea to go there to showcase some Animation and Art work. From Games Design  they chose me, and an artist called Shane (he is frickin' awesome, he has true passion for what he does, and is pretty popular for it too!), whose work is dark and morbid and cool. (see image to right)

I'm a little embarrassed, I would imagine there will be tons of great comic artist that will overshadow my work by miles. Not to mention Shane's cool art- did I mention he's cool? ( /-\ ) 

The embarrassment isn't even because of the difference in skill level, it is the quantity and relativity of the work I can muster up to display that will probably make me wander from my 'table' more often than not. I've been desperately looking for any cartoon/comic/anime type thing I've done for the past two years, and to my demise there is barely any. This doesn't mean I haven't been drawing, I have been- but for my work and assignments which needed more experimentation and research than practice. As a result I have a kooky mix of retarded fan art and artist impressionism and random bits of scribbles (my games design work) all over the place. Fan art, unfortunately is a large 'no, no' in portfolio displays. So that's half my stuff in the bin. It really does make me wonder, where have I put all my creative energies into all this time? Rubbish, or maybe I'm just concentrating too much on other things un-arty?

My only defence is that I have been working my ovaries off this year and last- on university work, grasping at opportunities, and volunteering for small side projects with one of the BSC Games Developement students (programmer, basically). Much of it was to do with more technical and sometimes less visually interesting things. I'll admit sometimes I need a break, and sometimes art is far from what I consider to be a break when it's the medium for work also. These past two weeks I've been working with motion-capture, trying to get the animations on my characters and into my game. I've modeled assets for my game project, and have recently been crafting my cosplay outfit (as you'll see in the top image), I've even been designing my business card: 

Front of business card Version 1

Front of business card Version 2

Back of card

 Personally I like the second design, it looks far less like final fantasy, and more like a cool and awesome logo that belongs to a much cooler and awesome person than myself... maybe like Shane *cries*. So if anyone reading this is going to the February CICAE in Cardiff, please if you see me- have mercy and be kind on my pathetic showcase portfolio T_T.