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Description
The title of this work is a portmanteau of the words fursona and synthesis. Here I've depicted my fursona in some sort of laboratory setting. It's nowhere near as detailed as it could have been, given my experience in courses and research work involving actual lab spaces. Recently, I noticed that my art predominantly showed backgrounds with little emphasis on the characters themselves. To keep my style evolving toward the acquisition and mastery of more techniques, I decided to produce a picture where the character takes up a significant amount of space in the whole composition. It wasn't easy to work against my acquired tendency or bias toward very small characters in large compositions such as Alpine Vulpine, but I'm proud of what I've done in this picture.

Though I was tempted to invoke some Fullmetal Alchemist sourced transmutation circles out of their aesthetic appeal, I have not yet developed a system to assign actual biological facts to the abstract geometric figures of those designs. Rather, I invoked the circular genetic code from a creative commons licensed image from wikipedia that appears on the back left wall. Rather than setting my fursona at the center of a circle, I opted for a rectangular pad. The genetic code referenced would apply to both the workings of my present day biology and my desired future biology as a Vulpes vulpes. The common system of linking codons (blocks of three DNA/RNA letters) to particular amino acid (building block) molecules works nearly the same across all known life forms. The circle of the wall poster is not the only graphical representation of the genetic code, but I had long planned to produce an artwork linking circles, life, and biochemistry. This result exists to imply that the working biochemistry of this world is behind the synthesis of my fursona's corporeal form in the picture.

The storage shelves on the back right of the picture actually include some higher shelves that didn't fit into the perspective of this composition. I'm proud to say that I built up the entire 3D structure within the student license version of Autodesk Maya 2015. It took less than an hour to build the structure, boxes, flasks, and beakers from polygon primitives in the virtual 3D stage. I had used the maya mental ray render option to produce the beakers and flasks in a glass material, but its fancy reflective/translucent features weren't exported successfully when I used the DAE file format. Even with solid color materials, I like how the overall structure turned out. I was only able to make the shelf and its objects so quickly because of the many hours across several days that I had previously spent on tutorial videos. Part of the shadow was also manually erased away when I imported the shelf structure so as to develop a coherent scene.

The floor, the door, the diagonal pattern pad, and the wall are sourced from the free textures site cgtextures. I've also used galvanized aluminum as a low opacity Overlay texture for the whole canvas. I used the 3D postcard from 2D image feature in Photoshop CC to develop the perspective of the image. I produced the caution pattern in Photoshop and gave it a texture overlay sourced from Photoshop's library. I also used a gradient overlay on the diagonal pattern pad to indicate a bit of shadow from the light source which originates from the bottom and right of the image, such as an unseen window or light. One of the most surprising outcomes of this work was that it took merely 6 hours to complete, not including time spent reviewing tutorials or practicing with Maya. I think I may want to focus more on the relative size of characters until I can comfortably depict them in a reasonable or consistently successful manner. In this picture, some oversights include the lack of vibrissiae (whiskers) and claws for my fursona. Though this picture is "lowercase t" transpecies, it's not in the "capital T" Transpecies gallery folder because my fursona is not a character in that story. For the fur painting/shading/lighting, I used some of the erase-away painterly shading tutorial by TamberElla as well as the downloaded "Fancypants" brush by KFCemployee here KFCemployee's favorite brushes .

Thoughtful comments and critique are greatly appreciated, as always.

Description
The title of this work is a portmanteau of the words fursona and synthesis. Here I've depicted my fursona in some sort of laboratory setting. It's nowhere near as detailed as it could have been, given my experience in courses and research work involving actual lab spaces. Recently, I noticed that my art predominantly showed backgrounds with little emphasis on the characters themselves. To keep my style evolving toward the acquisition and mastery of more techniques, I decided to produce a picture where the character takes up a significant amount of space in the whole composition. It wasn't easy to work against my acquired tendency or bias toward very small characters in large compositions such as Alpine Vulpine, but I'm proud of what I've done in this picture.

Though I was tempted to invoke some Fullmetal Alchemist sourced transmutation circles out of their aesthetic appeal, I have not yet developed a system to assign actual biological facts to the abstract geometric figures of those designs. Rather, I invoked the circular genetic code from a creative commons licensed image from wikipedia that appears on the back left wall. Rather than setting my fursona at the center of a circle, I opted for a rectangular pad. The genetic code referenced would apply to both the workings of my present day biology and my desired future biology as a Vulpes vulpes. The common system of linking codons (blocks of three DNA/RNA letters) to particular amino acid (building block) molecules works nearly the same across all known life forms. The circle of the wall poster is not the only graphical representation of the genetic code, but I had long planned to produce an artwork linking circles, life, and biochemistry. This result exists to imply that the working biochemistry of this world is behind the synthesis of my fursona's corporeal form in the picture.

The storage shelves on the back right of the picture actually include some higher shelves that didn't fit into the perspective of this composition. I'm proud to say that I built up the entire 3D structure within the student license version of Autodesk Maya 2015. It took less than an hour to build the structure, boxes, flasks, and beakers from polygon primitives in the virtual 3D stage. I had used the maya mental ray render option to produce the beakers and flasks in a glass material, but its fancy reflective/translucent features weren't exported successfully when I used the DAE file format. Even with solid color materials, I like how the overall structure turned out. I was only able to make the shelf and its objects so quickly because of the many hours across several days that I had previously spent on tutorial videos. Part of the shadow was also manually erased away when I imported the shelf structure so as to develop a coherent scene.

The floor, the door, the diagonal pattern pad, and the wall are sourced from the free textures site cgtextures. I've also used galvanized aluminum as a low opacity Overlay texture for the whole canvas. I used the 3D postcard from 2D image feature in Photoshop CC to develop the perspective of the image. I produced the caution pattern in Photoshop and gave it a texture overlay sourced from Photoshop's library. I also used a gradient overlay on the diagonal pattern pad to indicate a bit of shadow from the light source which originates from the bottom and right of the image, such as an unseen window or light. One of the most surprising outcomes of this work was that it took merely 6 hours to complete, not including time spent reviewing tutorials or practicing with Maya. I think I may want to focus more on the relative size of characters until I can comfortably depict them in a reasonable or consistently successful manner. In this picture, some oversights include the lack of vibrissiae (whiskers) and claws for my fursona. Though this picture is "lowercase t" transpecies, it's not in the "capital T" Transpecies gallery folder because my fursona is not a character in that story. For the fur painting/shading/lighting, I used some of the erase-away painterly shading tutorial by TamberElla as well as the downloaded "Fancypants" brush by KFCemployee here KFCemployee's favorite brushes .

Thoughtful comments and critique are greatly appreciated, as always.