Welcome Everybody!

Greetings and salutations! My name is Jeremy Tarwater, an aspiring 3D character artist. I am going to school at The Art Institute so I can get my Bachelor's degree and get into the video game industry as a 3D character artist and eventually a creative director of a current studio or my own. I like to design original characters and it is probably my most fulfilling hobby. I am trying to turn that hobby into a career and I have a year left at school before I graduate. Since I will be graduating soon, I thought it would be a good idea to start this blog so I can show my work and my workflow. Therefore, blog posts on this site will be mainly demonstrating my finished pieces and on the production workflow of current works in progress. While I may have many posts during a week, I plan to at least keep a minimum of two posts a week.

So now that you know what to expect, today I will start with the design of the logo itself. The logo was a design that was to replace an earlier design that I was using. Here is what the old logo looked like:

The old RedVermillion logo.

As you can see, the original logo was quite busy. The inspiration was from the works of Mark Rothko's minimalist paintings. The many different shades and tints of reds in the rectangles were supposed to represent the many facets of my personality, of my being, my ideas and so-forth. The red color was to represent my passion for everything I do. I am a very temperamental person, even if it doesn't seem like it in the real world. That passion is directed into my art and I hope to learn how to channel it more to create very emotional and realistic characters. Finally, the red also represents my love for the color red. It is my favorite color. Anything that has red is almost a guarantee that I will like it or at least get a +1 from me like red cars, red fruit like cherries or strawberries (I especially love cherries), red lightsabers, red packaging, red clothing, and definitely red hair. As you may notice as I start to post more images on the blog, you may see many of my characters (or at least female characters) have red hair. It's not that I don't know how to do other hair colors, it's just that I love red hair because it's well... red!

As you can see, red is very central to who I am, hence the name RedVermillion. Vermilion itself is actually a shade of red-orange but many people associate it with red. In addition, I added an extra "L" to the spelling as a play on "million" to represent quality and richness to my works.

After I showed the logo to several of my peers at the school and some professionals, it became clear that there were some issues with the design. The biggest one was that it was too busy. Therefore, I made it a priority to simplify the design. I still wanted the facets of my personality concept but it needed to be simpler. Thus I came up with the gem like shape with less squares. At the same time, those shades of red now go from light to dark inside the gem. The text itself changed as well from Century Gothic font to the bold professional lines of Gill Sans. That font is the same used by many companies around the world, most prominently the BBC; thus I thought it prudent to use this font to exude a level of professionalism from my logo that was not previously present.

The final result is what you see at the top of the site. Far more simpler but still captures the original idea behind me and who I am.

So that's the story behind the logo and the name. My next post will start getting into my art and what my current works of progress are so stay tuned!