Week 5 - CAP Brief

We finally got our CAP briefs and there are a lot to choose from. I'm most interested in the concept art ones as well as the 3d modelling ones, which include both environment art and character art.

I really like the environment art brief as it has the added challenge of following some concept art that has already been created and making a scene from that. This is a skill that would be very useful to show when trying to actually get work as an environment artist.

And the character modelling brief also interests me as character art has generally been an area that I either avoid or just don't get a lot of experience with

Sketching

Some doodles in my sketchbook of some environments. 

I love the west coast of Scotland and the rugged pebble beaches covered in rocks of all shapes and sizes, with seaweed, old fishing equipment and all sorts of other tuff washed up by the tide. I would like to try and finish this in photoshop, focusing mostly on the different textures and colours

Conceptart.org do an environment of the week challenge and their current one was to create an environment based around a pagoda. I like trying these when I have time, even if its just a sketch or two, to try and force myself into looking at all sorts of different things I would never have thought of. In this case I spent a lot of time looking at zen gardens and shinto temples

Week 3 - Live Drawing

For week 3 we were sent out to find a place to sit and draw people as they went about their lives. So we would have only a few seconds to get the basic movement and pose of people before they were gone or had moved to a different pose. This task was pretty fun trying to show as much of these peoples movement as possible. I also found it to be very difficult trying to find someone who would be interesting to draw and then by the time I did they were gone before I could start drawing. I think I was trying to get too much unnecesary detail, as looking at other artists attempts at this all thats needed to get the idea across can be as little as a couple of lines. Though as the task went on I do believe that my drawings got a bit less fussy and I stopped caring about smaller details. More practice doing this would be great as I also found that the first few drawings felt pretty awkward trying not to stare too much at people having their coffee. There were definitely a few lecturers from uni clearly knew they were being drawn..  

Week 2 - Still Life

This week we were given a group of objects to practice our still life drawing. I got a ball of wool, a pair of trainers and a disco ball... This group was pretty interesting to try and draw as they were all so different to each other. I tried to draw quite loosely and to try to focus on what I thought was the main thing about each of these. So the ball of wool was a mess of lines going everywhere, the disco ball was a whole bunch of mirrors stuff on the ball reflecting different shades of what was around it and the shoes were there too I suppose. I think the shoes are what gave me the most difficulty on this task as drawing them I tried to focus on their shape and tone, but that led to my drawing style becoming more and more tight and trying to get things to be too perfect. This had the problem of both making the drawing overall less expressive and loose, as well as not being as accurate as it should instead have been, due to having a limited time and trying to get as much done in that time.

If I were to attempt this drawing again I would change the medium I was using to something like charcoal and work on a much larger scale. This would force me to be more loose with my drawing and hopefully make for a more cohesive piece, with things like the cotton wool and disco ball not just looking messy. Instead I would like them to be a bit more abstract and get across the general idea of what each thing was a bit better.

Week 1 - Perspective Drawing

For our first Computer Arts practice lab we were tasked with going and finding somewhere within the campus to practice our perspective drawings.  

I was pretty happy with this. It had been a long time since I had tried to do a perspective drawing, but once I got started it all began to come back to me. I think I used the construction lines properly to get the right scale and perspective, especially on things like the pillars, which I was expecting to be a nightmare to draw. I think the actual drawing could be a lot nicer however. A lot of the lines could be a bit more confident and less sketchy, and seeing as how this is a drawing showing the architecture of the building, a ruler would have been very useful! The drawing could also benefit from having some more time spent adding tone and shading to try and get a better sense of scale. Right now, it seems very flat with only the actual perspective drawing to give the piece any depth to it