MA Introduction Post

About me

I'm Katie Lofts, a 3D artist that was previously just on the Bachelors Games Design course at UCLan. After graduating, I decided I wanted to continue on to do the Masters as well!

Previous work on the BA

My Skills

The work I made within the undergraduate course varied quite a bit towards the last year; going from my comfort zone of heavily stylised work into dipping my toes into some realistic styled work as well. Stylised art is probably my favourite kind to work in and learn more about. I used and I am comfortable with programs such as; Photoshop, Substance Painter & Designer, Maya, Unreal Engine, and ZBrush to name a few. 

I think that a strong skill of mine is being able to break down and analyse different references or art to inform my practise, or at least, this is a particular area I enjoy. I've worked on collecting all different kinds of art over the years, sorting them into different categories within my own personal Discord server, as to ensure I have a wide variety of things to inspire me at any given time -- even things outside of my personal specialism (3D Art). Here's a snippet of all the "channels", each full of links and images to things I've found from others:

I found during the BA that I also really enjoyed the researching and blogging my process. I would create intricate blog posts and presentations that explained every step of my journey in whatever project I was doing, and sometimes I even got to create some tutorial videos. 

My Interests

As mentioned briefly before, a big interest of mine lies within stylised art. I love seeing the new developments within this area and the discussions that come along with it online. 

In general, I think I just like to learn. Learning about new things within my specialism or Games Design as a whole is what really excites me. Finding new tutorials online, online courses, Twitter and Discord community discussions, ArtStation breakdowns and talking to others is perhaps my favourite part about this practise. Pushing myself to try new techniques and experiment is just something that I find I get the most joy out of; doing something new with each project.

At the moment, I'm particularly interested in games such as Genshin Impact and their approach to their artstyle and technical art within their world. I also enjoy games like Cyberpunk 2077 and League of Legends, and find it interesting to see how they build their own universe that can be so detached from our reality.

Outside of games, I've always had a keen interest in character design and character illustration. I thought I wanted to be a character designer for most of my life, until I found 3D modelling within the BA course. Still, when not doing games-related work, I like to sketch and paint portraits for fun:

Aside from that, growing up, my mother has always taught me about art history, architecture, sewing, etc. I think this has led to being able to apply a unique perspective on certain aspects within games, e.g discussing if something is historically accurate or if a character design's fabrics would be suited within their world or not, for example. 

Plan for Masters

I have a few ideas for what I want to study within the Masters course, and at the moment, I feel like I cannot really narrow it down to one that I really one hundred percent want to do.

I feel like I have an interest in many things at the moment, yet, haven't really found the passion to fully commit to one just yet. The closest I have come to that feeling is on the topic of accessibility within games, yet, I'm unsure if that is the perfect one just yet.

This week, I've spent a lot of time trying to brainstorm different topics and ideas in the form of a mindmap on my iPad. The topic that I've by far been able to come up with the most ideas for is the one of accessibility within games.

My other ideas/topics also were;

• Social and ethical problems within games
• Artificial Intelligence
• Learning and teaching others within games
• Lighting and atmosphere within games
• Visual communication
• Lore and worldbuilding

Which, are all topics that do interest me and I'd like to research more about in general, but I have yet to feel like one topic particularly clicks to the point I could cover it for a whole year during Masters.

Also, I'm concerned that at the moment the things I like to actually create are quite far from the areas of research I've listed above, and I'm unsure at the moment how I could interlink them properly.

However, the topic of accessibility within games was my very first thought of what I could cover, and like I said, have the most potential topics of things to research into and talk about. My classmates gave me a few ideas of what I could potentially make from the subject as well, such as;

• A "accessible" environment compared to an "inaccessible one"
• A sword/prop art series representing different elements within accessibilty/representation, such as blindness.
• A series of uniquely designed prosthetics, eventually to be 3D modelled.

I recognised that my preferred style of working is also within very high fantasy worlds, as well. E.g; Sea of Thieves style, or the League of Legends style. I thought perhaps I could try to create a bridge between very high fantasy visuals and various topics within accessibilty -- perhaps design a more fantastical or medieval environment with modern elements of accessibility not usually found in the former settings.

Within my next blog post, I plan to delve deeper into the listed topics and figure out potentially what I could ultimately be creating.