More Life Drawing

Title is self explanatory. This is work from my last two life drawing lessons and by last I mean last, at least as far as course scheduled life drawing is concerned.

3 minute poses in charcoal.

1 minute poses in charcoal

Perspective practice in charcoal. It's not too bad I don't think. 

15 minute pose in coloured pencil.

15 minute pose in black pigment liner.

More 3 minute poses in charcoal.

1 minute poses in charcoal.

Practicing faces. Both at least look vaguely human, just not much like the model.

15 minute pose in Copic marker.

15 minute pose in pencil with Copic marker. Still hopeless with hands...

And that's that it seems for now. I like to think I've gotten better at life drawing over the last two terms, or at least I hope I have.

Life Drawing

I should probably get into a better habit when it comes to posting my life drawing work so here some now:

Eraser and charcoal on charcoal rubbed paper.

This turned out much better than I expected.

5 minute poses in charcoal.

One minute poses in charcoal.

15 minute pose in pencil.

15 minute pose in Copic marker.

I was quite partial to this one even though the proportions of the bottom of the chair are quite the bit off.

15 minute pose in Copic marker and coloured pencil.

My personal favourite. I used the coloured pencil to highlight the lightest areas on the model. 

Apologies for the poor quality of photographs, my phone's camera is atrocious and I am a terrible cameraman.  

Life Drawing

Just some of my pieces of life drawing work from this term (it's about time I put them up). Even though most of our course work is done digitally it is still founded in the essentials of art, which we impart study with life drawing. In these classes we replace Wacoms with charcoal. I hate charcoal, just thought I'd throw it out there.

Run of the mill 5 minute poses with charcoal.

Scribbly sketch.

Portraits with exaggerated curves.

Oddly enough, I am quite proud of my ink work.

I took a more illustrative approach with the ink, drawing with it more so than painting with it.

Just thought I'd throw this all at ya in one go. And I do apologise for the quality of some of these pictures, they were taken on my phone. 

The Skeleton

With our week's classwork being based on the proportions of the body and how it can be altered to make characters and creatures look more exiting our homework was also suitably body based. We were tasked with studying the skeleton and it's mechanical nature (ie. its joint structure). First off we had to do studies of key areas of the skeleton before finally doing a front, side and back view of a skeleton complete with labels of bones and joints.

The idea of the studies was to sketch and try and learn about key areas of the skeleton using as many sources as possible. It was whilst in the midst of doing these drawings that I found myself thinking that surely all areas of the skeleton are key areas of the skeleton. Surely?

Next was the front, back and side view.

I learned from this exercise that drawing skeletons is not particularly fun. They are very technical and I found it hard to keep the proportions of different parts correct to one another. The rib cage and pelvis being particularly demanding.

All in all it seems like the key lesson here is practice drawing more skeletons Quinn.  

Insectoid Character Design

The task given to us, a couple weeks back, was to come up with an "imaginative concept" for an insect-ish character which could be used to discuss possible art directions in some hypothetical future game. We needed to: compile a moodboard, do some sketches, work up further your three favorite sketches, do a front and left blueprint style view of your chosen character design and then a final three-quarter view piece of your final design. With two weeks to work on it this was our most demanding piece of concept work yet. So without further ado, moodboard:

With the moodboard to help me I got on with some sketches in my sketch book.

After scribbling down a few sketches I was quite clear to me which ones were my favorites. So it was off to Photoshop to see if I could work the concepts further.

God bless layer via copy (my preferred way of producing symmetry in a piece). .

Front and profile mugshot(ish) style pics as required. Getting everything in line was a pain.( Note presence of smaller abdominal claws which were subsequently dropped from the design as I felt that they didn't and much to the creature and just got lost in the thorax detailing.) 

Although I was fond of them all, ever since I did a sketch of 'im in my sketchbook there has always been a special place in my heart for "Super Mantis" (called so because of his size, not as an indication of any super powerful aspects).

I used a leather texture on his shelly part.I don't think it looks half bad really.

The final picture. I must admit that drawing this (not so) little fella was a complete and utter nightmare. Trying to get his thorax and shell look right in a three-quarter view was eye-gougingly

stressful but after a while I finally got what I was looking for. I'm quite happy with how the colouring came out but wish that perhaps I could have made i a little more interesting, replacing the need for black outlines with shade and tone. But, alas, I was quite frankly losing the will to live with this piece after trying to get the line work to look right and am still rather happy with the out come.  

Week 6- Hallowe'en Assignment

With All Hallow's Eve around the corner our homework given was suitably ghoulish. We were tasked with coming up with a scary monster concept. By now I'm sure you know the drill; mood board:

With this this all assembles out of images grabbed from all four corners of Google images I set about to do some concept sketches trying to figure out what I could do.

I briefly entertained the idea of an aristocratic pumpkin guy.

The pumpkin seen here at the top  was a large influence on my final concept.

Scribbling out these concepts gave me a fairly good idea of what I wanted to do.

So in Photoshop I drew out and coloured my final concept:

Wouldn't like to run into him on a dark evening, luckily with that large glowing pumpkin stitched into his torso you'd see him coming from a mile away.

 Lo and behold, the aptly named "Franken-Monster-Pumpkin-Thing". I had a lot of fun with this guy, splicing together a large, ugly Frankenstein's monster-esque thing with a large malevolent jack-o-lantern. Complete, of course, with large hacky-slicey pole arm (all the better to butcher you with, m'dear). 

   

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.