CDDA - Prop final angle

Today I started work on my prop beauty shot. After struggling to get the spheres and head of the prop right on my line work I decided to restart and use a 3D model render to help me. Essentially I modeled my hammer pick and then chose an angle and rendered it. After this I took it into Photoshop and traced the edges making a few small changes here and there. Tomorrow I will colour the design.

CDDA - Prop thickness

Today when contemplating what angles to draw my prop from I realized that I had not drawn how thick the hammer pick is. Whilst reasonably simple for the majority of it being spheres and a cylinder, the head could have caused problems later on. As you can see in the picture, the head is the widest part and just below it you can see the end of the pick and how wide that is. The bottom also has a few varying degrees of thickness but nothing too major. I did this as a thumbnail as it didn't really matter as to the detail, just the actual shape and silhouette of it. 

CDDA - Character Pose

After contemplating my previous poses and taking into account my friends opinions and criticisms on them I decided to choose the top left of my three poses but wanted to make some changes. My friends said that you couldn't see enough of him (my character)  in the pose as a lot of him was in shadow. I decided to turn the camera on the same pose a bit and change his stance a little. From here you see more of the blacksmith and less is in shadow. Whilst I like this I still want lots of contrast in the pose to make it interesting. Much of my character is still in shadow whilst others are brightly lit by the brazier nearby. I also would need to sort out the anvil slightly as I originally drew my character too tall and had to shorten the whole image. Next I will try to get a basic colour scheme of what the image will have.

CDDA - Character beauty shot pose work

I just finished off a few pose ideas for my final character image. Whilst basic and messy I think they show values and poses of them quite well and get the general gist of the idea across. At the moment I don't know which one I would like to take forward and plan to think on it a bit more. I also have some friends who I plan to show the work and have them give me opinions and critiques on them.

CDDA - Back character view and turnaround board

Today I finished the back view of my character and in doing so finished my turnaround board for him. The back view was interesting, I can't remember ever really drawing someone from the back before so I had a bit to learn. Overall I'm happy how it came out though, he still looks like the same character. 

My turnaround board came out really well in my opinion. It's all to scale and everything seems correct between the pictures. I think this piece of work will really help when it comes to the creation of my beauty shots of the character. The next piece of work I plan to do is some character texture experimentation's, just to practice underlying photos and make sure I do the best I can on my final work.  

CDDA - Character texture reference/underlay

Today I referenced some images to use in my character beauty shot. These would be used under the colour of my choice to enhance it and make it more 3D, less flat. I got brown leather for the apron, gold for the boots, I got wool for the shirt but in the wrong colour so I will either change this in Photoshop or find more pictures, human skin though I would probably darken this slightly and black wool/black leather for the trousers. 

CDDa - Life drawing - Texture

These are my life drawing sketches from last week. Sorry for the bad images, they have been rolled up all weekend as I had to leave straight after the life drawing session. This week the focus was on texture. I used a charcoal pencil but would have preferred some actual charcoal this week, I feel that would have been easier to get more onto the paper with. Our model was sat on a dark, shiny bean bag with 2 different fabrics covering parts of it. My first 2 drawings are 10 minute sketches near the start of the session. The first was just me getting warmed up.

The second is better, I began to add a little texture but too slowly. 

My third drawing was much better, we had 15 minutes for this. This time I quickly got the model into the picture and started detailing the area. I didn't finish all the texture but I feel that I at least showed that the different objects he sat on were different textures and materials. 

This was a 45 minute sketch. I spent most of time focused on the robe, the theme was textures after all, and feel really happy with the finished robe. It was quite a heavy, large robe and I feel that I did well with this sketch. The material folded in a similar way to the sleeve ends of my Dwarfs undershirt for my character and I feel that I may be able to use this image for reference on the different kinds of folds.