Week 5- Perspective Homework

Perspective is one of those things in art that you can't really be bothered to learn but know that it is of fundamental importance, so you jump into the deep end and just slug along with it. the work for week 5 was two pieces of fairly rudimentary one-point perspective both based on the teachings of two YouTube videos.

The first piece is that of a room drawn using one-point perspective (and as steady a hand as one could muster).

Apologies for the scanning, but I'm sure you get the picture (no pun intended, even if it is a terrible pun...).

The second: a slightly more complicated piece of an abandoned highway on some apocalyptic near-future Earth. This one was done with a ruler and boasts a sprinkling of colour.

A grimy and gritty abandoned highway. I have inked the more important lines but many of the original pencil lines which join up to the vanishing point are still there, I feel it just helps one to see the inner workings of a picture sometimes.

  

Oh, perspective. There to teach us that art is not all just crazy squiggles and vibrant colours, it, too, has a duller side (its own inner chartered accountant, if you will).

Week 4- Gun design Homework

The title says it all. For homework we had to design a futuristic, mechanical projectile firing weapon.
As with all design projects a mood board was required:

Some are real weapons most are from games or concepts which other artists have come up with. With these in tow I was able to get sketching my own ideas down into my sketch pad.

These are the above aforementioned with ideas ranging from quadruple-barreled shotguns to high powered single shot railgun pistols (naturally I also included some doodles of vaguely gun shaped things).

Looking at these sketches I found myself quite partial to the idea of a futuristic break-action quadruple-barreled shotgun. A gun that perhaps one could use to defend your space freighter of boarders and invaders. 

I think I can honestly say that I am most proud of the "space shotgun shell" in the lower left hand corner
(Note slightly boss-eyed top right-hand barrel in the gun's front view...whoops).

  

The finished thing (done in Photoshop if you couldn't guess). I took aspects of some of my other weapons and combined them with the quad-barrel shotty-blam to make a big, hefty, probably-hard-to-hold but powerfully frightening hand cannon of a shotgun.

Personal Work: Horned guy-thing

Just thought that I would share a little non-homework piece of work. I just started doodling some head designs of some kind of horned creature liked one and thought that I would try and do something more substantial with it.

Not a happy looking chap is he...

Everything but the face is relatively under worked but the idea was to draw the eye to the centre where, lo and behold, the face is.

I also added an overlay layer to the picture and threw in some purple-ish (maybe?) tones just to be able to better envision the colour of the creature's skin.

I could have done more with the horns and hair, but I am happy the contrast that they bring to the better rendered face.

   That's all really, just a quick painted piece that I was quite happy with (sometime I just try to paint something and it all goes downhill from there so I think I got quite lucky with this one).

Unity Level Design Homework

Our first piece of homework given to us in our first Games Encounters class was to block in a basic level map in Unity (being thrown into the deep end seems to be this years theme). I will not bother you with boring images of colourless blocks being thrown around here and there but one I had the general layout correct the map looked like this:

I was going for an ancient Egyptian feel.The idea was that the player would be exploring an old and forgotten site of temples and pyramids with some creepy aspects such as the pyramids floating orb, hinting at some kind of ancient magic.

With a splash of colour the map took on this appearance:

I chose a simple sandy palette, naturally, it is after all set in the Egyptian desert. I am very happy with the dark colour of the floating orb as it contrasts nicely with the predominantly sandy theme and it draws the players eye. 

A series of screen shots from a first person perspective:

A view up a the pyramid just outside of where the player starts.

The "Obelisk". 

A poorly lit picture I know, but it is of a gold figure inside the main temple with an alter in front of it. It signifies the end of the level

It was all built very simply, using a plain as the ground, a variety of cuboid shapes for the buildings and pyramid and cylinders for the pillars, with the odd sphere here or there.   

Week 4- Crusty-Ocean things (Crustaceans)

The task this week, following a couple of tutorial videos by FDZ School of Design on YouTube, was to design three crustacean monster concepts by first designing a silhouette for the creatures and then working it up into something more readable as it were. Naturally, as with any design project, I started with a mood board of many things clawy and crabby:

Gotta love isopod eyes, stare right into your soul...

Using my reference to help me I got to work of three monstrous (or at least monster-ish) silhouettes which ended up being: something crab-ish, something isopod-ish and something lobster-ish.

I like the one on the right, the way his arched hulking back moves down to his twiggy little arms. I feel he is just the right sort of unpleasant.

To finish it all off I through in a splash of colour, numbered them, added a sleek grey background and a few bubbles ( I though this may make it look all good and professional and what not).

The line up completed.

Week 3- Caterpillar Exercise

In class this week our task was to produce a complete painted rendition of a piece of line-work given. This was a caterpillar like alien creature as seen below:

The line art given.

Base colours added with shadows.

The finished piece showing base palette to the right. 

Despite my lack of practice in painting with Photoshop I was fairly happy with the results I got, even if he is, perhaps, a little neon.

The sheet given to help guide our progress (in case you were curious) .

Week 3- Tentacle Assignment

 The task this week was to come up with an imagined creature with tentacles, a staple of sci-fi and fantasy artwork. To help with the design process I created a mood board containing reference images containing tentacles from creatures ranging from star-nosed moles to Eldritch Abominations with other potentially helpful images thrown in for good measure. The mood board itself:

A beautiful mosaic of many seemingly random images shotgunned onto a Photoshop page.

Green tentacled warrior lady (note the king of the star-nosed moles in the bottom right-hand corner, arguably the best thing I've ever come up with).

Bizarre octo-man monster with floppy tentacle hands and feet and corals growing out of his shoulders.

The two pictures above are a couple of the ideas that I came up with for my monster. My idea is that it would be marine life based because, y'know, octopuses (octopi? octopods?). I briefly had the idea to go with a star-nosed mole derived monster as it would be quite original and its nose-feelers are technically tentacles, but I had no idea where to go with it so I kept on track with my marine monstrosity theme.

Week 1- First Sketchbook Assignment

Steam powered Gatling walker thing.

The aptly named "Kettle"(Working with colouring pencils is clearly not my forte, so forgive me on that part). 

A couple of weeks ago we were given our first piece homework to do which was to quite simply create a "bad-ass" original robot. I went for a Victorian/Steam punk feel as one can see. The first picture is a walker style robot concept of mine complete with front mounted Gatling gun and middle lamp/eye thing. The second is my final concept, a tall fairly human shaped machine bearing a Gatling gun for his left arm and a steam locomotive inspired torso.