they mostly come at night...mostly

It seems wellingtonians come out at night, especially friday and saturday nights and the happy campers I'd witnessed between rush hours by day are replaced by a much hipper, slicker, far better looking crowd at night.

When I get back home tomorrow I'll start scanning the drawings I did while I was here- mainly life drawings (and my life drawings that I convert on the fly).

As for the workshop, hmmmm....I'd say drawing any sort of mech-ish soldier is a fair waste of time- as is doing pages of guns- there seems to be quite a lot of those in existence in people's folio's. Myriads.

Also quite a lot of sketchbooks with sort of 'surrealist train of thoughty' pages of merged drawings, some in highly rendered miniscule.

So what's the answer? Well I'd say its actual design and designs that work/are functional (within whichever fantasy framework).

I saw pages and pages of peoples design variations- but there never seemed to be any basis for judging one option against another - particularly with clothing.

And its odd that, for example you see a lot of legged mechs/robots/tanks- but I'm yet to see any with multi-directional wheels for example( Nasa seems to like them on their concepts)

I quite liked Wes Burt and Noxismad and their work, and actually Jason Manley's talk on contracts/legal stuff was the most important /useful bit of the whole show.

Seems a lot of people work off digital photos, particularly with life drawing(except obviously the instructors -with the exception of Andrew Jones.

The life drawing models were in general very good,

there was one girl who dressed up in various cosplay sort of get-ups... so looked interesting- but she didn't keep still-which made things difficult.

Whereas there were a group who had been hired from 'Mermaids'( a local strip club) who all kept very still during poses and were basically excellent.

It weird to think that for so long where I used to work concept art was a peripheral thing -almost an unjustifiable luxury even as far as during Destroy All Humans, where they had trouble 'finding work' for the one "official" concept artist at the time.

The other answer is to work on my own projects or a have a specific purpose and an accompanying context for what I do. And I still didn't see anything that might relate to contemporary design- say of buildings or products- it all seems firmly set in the game fantasy design style- so there's an opening there. Given how many in america emerge from that Art Centre place, you'd think they'd be busting to have contemporary modern design in their city environments.
Interesting how people from cold countries really embrace modern design and how they seem to be very creative- maybe its because they get cooped up and need something to pass the time.

Enough rant though, it is after all "the art stupid'". So next post will be a big drawing post.