CDDA - Life Drawing Session 3

This week in life drawing we had a focus on perspective and short poses. The first piece of art we were directed to do was a drawing focusing on perspective. We were allowed to choose any kind of perspective we wanted so I went with a simple one point as I'm not very confident with perspective artwork. We were told to populate the page with simple blocks at first and then draw the model at the forefront of the picture. We then had to draw the same pose in the middle of the picture, still in the same proportions as the front picture using the lines from the vanishing point. We then drew him in a new pose standing up at the background of the picture, still to scale. I managed this quite well I think even though I struggled to add the detail because of the size of my drawings.

Next we went onto doing very short poses showing a set of movement using weaponry. The first set used nun-chucks and we were given only 2 minutes to draw each pose. This meant getting in the basic look of the body, focusing on angles of limbs and where the joints were. I enjoyed this and I like what I came out with.  

The next set of drawings we were given 3 minutes to draw and the weapons featured were small short swords. This time through I had a minute to sort out the actual body lines after blocking in the skeletons angles and joints so they look quite a lot better this time. I really enjoyed this exercise and could definitely see the benefit of it. 

The last 30 minutes was spent on a longer pose focusing on our perspective of the room. I am a bit mixed about this picture. I really like the full body image of our model, I feel I got the material of his robe and his pose down well (yet the legs are a little short sadly). But I got bogged down in that and had to rush to get any other parts of the image in before we finished.

Intro to 3D - Vending Machine Concept Update

Since my last update on my vending machine project, I have made quite a few design changes regarding how it would actually work and function correctly. The first change I addressed was probably the most important, how the bottles dispense and are given to the customer. Before I had a bay underneath the machine that the bottle would fall into. Whilst I like the idea, considering the machine is based off the 1950's when they used glass bottles, it had a flaw in that the bottle itself could have smashed. So to change this I came up with the idea of having the actual buttons dispense bottles. To do this the customer would pay for their drink and then pull the lever next to the button. The button would fold out slightly showing a holder with a bottle in it. This looks nice, won't break the bottle and is more suitable to a machine that is situated on \a bar or table. The next change was a coin slot. This is pretty obvious but I forgot previously as to how the customers would pay. I gave each button its own coin slot partially for aesthetics but also because of how the levers work. Lastly I gave the machine a power source. Again very obvious but something I previously missed. It is simply a wall socket plug coming out the back of the machine. Below you can see my updated blueprints and new perspective artwork that show the changes.  

CDDA - Life drawing session 2

During my life drawing session this week we focused on learning new ways to get the correct proportions in an average human body. During the last sketch we focused more on shadows and putting someone in a scene but still focused on correct proportions. The first method we looked at was to simply draw a stickman of the model, showing lengths and angles of the limbs and locations of important body parts such as the hips. I used to use this method when I first started doing any artwork so it was very familiar to me and I still found it helpful during this session.

The other method we looked at was using 8 spaces to help create the body. These spaces were each the size of the human head as 8 heads is the same height as the whole body. Whilst helpful, I found that I didn't really enjoy this method as much as the stickman. Not that it didn't help me create the correct proportions, I just find other methods easier. 

The next picture shows 2 drawings of my model with incorrect proportions. This is because we did an exercise where we had to make certain spaces different sizes using the 8 heads method. This meant that certain areas of the body were stretched longer whilst some had less room. This was fun and shows how it could be used to create creatures or humans who are not perfectly average size.

My last picture was focusing on light and dark whilst putting someone in a scene. The lighting within the life drawing room could not be controlled this week so the lighting changed with the sky outside, sadly making realistic shading all over difficult. I enjoyed this exercise and found that putting someone in a scene can make it look better overall. It was also a good exercise in that I learnt a bit of how the human bodies structure looks between light and dark. 

This session did help me a lot even though we did not practice drawing with my preferred method of getting correct perspective (using a skeleton with joints, similar to the stickman). Putting the model in the scene was the most useful part of the session as it is something I have always struggled with and I now feel more confident towards future work.