CDDA - Environment base colours

This morning I have completed my base colours for my environment scene. It's pretty simple. I worked alongside my character and prop beauty shots as I want the colours to be similar in a sense as I feel that the Dwarfs would be a very united people and such use a similar colour palette. The pillars are made with a kind of iron/stone hybrid (my prop hammer and pickaxe material), the torch is silver (prop handle) but the shadow has made it look too dark, the gate is gold (prop decoration) and the lettering ruby (as is the writing on my prop). The floor is a kind of light stone, similar to a sand colour, whilst the main path is iron which I plan to have some kind of engraving on. The path has occasional red rugs and the gold diamonds will likely be a similar design to them. Below you can see in order, base colours with base shadow, base colours with both base light and shadow, a pattern I may apply to the iron path and then possible rug patterns. I will next get rid of my linework and then find textures for all the materials (though I may use the same as in my prop). Once that's done I will update on here again. It should be done today and then I plan to try and start neatening up the shadows in the scene first before adding the lit areas and highlights. 

CDDA - Environment 3D mockup

I just finished work on a 3D model of a previous environment design I did a while back. I did this because it will help tremendously with the perspective of the scene as there are a lot of objects and many of them are round too which would further complicate drawing them. I also took the opportunity to make some plans for the lighting of the scene. My final scene may look a little different composition wise but it will be pretty similar. I also want to darken some areas as the scene is too bright, I wish to darken the back wall quite a bit and make lots of shadows in the scene too. This didn't take long either so I think making it will pay off in the long run.

CDDA - Photo Manipulation

So today I did a photo manipulation to give an example of some of the things that might go in my environment. It was quite a new experience to me which I found tricky at first, taking me a long time to put my first item into the environment and feeling that it didn't really fit. Once I started adding light and shadows to the objects they began to sit a lot better in the environment. Also changing the hue to a more orange colour helped them fit in too. I think that I may do something along this line of track when drawing my final environment to sketch over as it could be really useful for getting perspective and shapes right. Overall I enjoyed making this and think it's a viable way of developing ideas for environments. 

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.

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.