Hello fellow classmates, friends, and strangers!

My name is Terry and I come from Quincy, MA located south of the Greater Boston area. I am a junior, Chinese, IMGD BA student concentrated in Technical Art.

A Short History
Due to my Asian background and circle of friends, my love for art (and where my art style originated) comes deeply from my love from Japanese anime. Since I was small, I have been deeply absorbed in the world of anime since 2005 thanks the now dead 4-Kids channel and my Cantonese dubbed Pokemon series. That’s when I began my journey down a large anime rabbit hole. A lot of binging and a lot of great impressions were made as the anime style got more and more developed as time went on. With anime comes obviously the massive amounts of fand art from my favorite series, characters, and even video games like the Tales series or Persona. Further pushing my artistic interest to focus more on anime, I wish to continue to specialize into it and identify myself with it.
I first attempted to try to create 2D animation, but it was very much tedious and a high skill level that required me to abandon the thought of 2D animation all together (even more so once I learned how bad the industry can get). Even so, I have not stopped trying to develop my art style and draw more of my favorite anime characters.

Alongside with anime, I also loved video games. They were like a secondary source of inspiration that made me start to appreciate 3D art, but also changed me into a real big computer nerd. Mixing these two together eventually brings me in to how I switched into a BA Tech Art Major (I was originally CS freshman year) where I finally got a good grasp on the 3D animation and modeling. I do hope in the future I can take a more cinematic approach to animation, but game animation is definitely a great secondary path to go on too.

Experiences and Goals
My experience for art is mostly on the traditional side and have stayed traditional until I started digital painting around a year ago. I have used Adobe Photoshop for a couple years, Clip Art Studio for a year now, and had 4-5 years of serious traditional art drawings (not just simple doodling) and sketching in my old sketchbooks. I only started to 3D animate and model with Maya, Zbrush, and Blender last year, but I quickly fell in love to trying a different art form.

Now even though I’ve been practicing and learning these skills, I really need a set goal or objective to work. Too many distractions will cause me to either not take my projects all the way, or abandon them mid-way. I am hoping in this class I could actually start putting together all my experiences and make something I want to be proud of.
And since this is mainly a pipeline working environment, I am really hoping to just improve my modelling and animation which can be applied in game. I have not made a game before, but previous classes were just enough to get me to understand the process.

Creative Inspirations
As for any creative inspirations, most definitely a lot of my inspirations come from anime fandoms and art. Since they are literally everywhere on the internet (even with the language barriers) I am always impressed how good some artists are. Take a couple of hours stalking art sites in Weibo, Naiver, and Pixiv and you would understand.

Since I’m also doing a lot of 3D work, any anime-styled 3D video games really do help me inspire as well. Some popular examples I can name are the Persona series and the Legend of Zelda : Breath of the Wild, but also some more not well-known 3D games I can include are Honkai Impact 3rd (Chinese Moblie->PC port), Code Vein (Literally best customization I have ever seen), and most recently released Genshin Impact (I am playing this currently and I love this style so much)

Finished and Previous Works of Art

Below are all the art pieces I’ve worked on the past (and even like this month too!)

Over the summer, I also worked on these personal drawings in Clip Art since I finally bought a graphics tablet (still RIP 250$). They are considered my own original character(s) (but they’re identical twins) and there’s some new ones too. (I literally made the heart emoji recently -> Not my OC)

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