Crossbow and form rendering

The premise and focus of this week was to practice rendering and get my crossbow concept to a satisfactory finish. I struggled quite a bit with rendering material and its something im looking to practice for next week's challenge from the foundation patreon group and Sam Neilsons Classes.

The main thing i learnt this week about rendering is that it's best to have a clear idea of the material you are painting and reference of what you are trying to render and do prior 30-45 min warm up studies and break each part into segments before applying a soft ambient gradient to each plane and any details. Patience is key, the crucial part is also the underlying structure underneath its good to get a solid structure and try to work on getting a solid line design before tackling a materials and rendering it. I also had a go at using the pen tool with selections and try a more clean strategy to paint with the fewest paint strokes as possible, practicing how to implement the gradient tool in my work flow has been a major eye opener and help figure out strategies of working more efficient and smarter in general.

My Challenge next week is to learn to paint different materials in black and white and render then to the best of my ability.

Creating the Crossbow for a first person shooter was great fun. I found this assignment a great challenge and there are alot of areas for improvement in terms of functionality and practicality in design. Which made me realise i should have done a bit more research on which ill definitely remember for future assignments. Overall im satisfied with what i learnt about rendering from this piece, however bit displeased with the overall outcome of the design, the continuity and the process of creating from 2D to 3D and back to 2D disrupted a bit of the the flow of my original intent and lost some of the initial forms. Main studies these coming weeks will be to get better at identifying basic forms and rendering them and to paint with careful attention how the values are changing between transitions of forms

Form and Rendering (Crossbow)

My main focus for this week was to practice rendering geoforms and begin to learn how to plot and depict convincing shadows on matte surface planes. I managed to produce a rough block out for my crossbow but will need to work on next week implementing a 3D block out using possibly blender to draw over. Aside from that, this week was a fairly busy week went to a few guest speakers discussing the future of UK entertainment industry and its ties with the education. 

I feel i could have made more progress with my crossbow design and feel i should spend next week honing it into more of a portfolio piece. However so far I am satisfied what i managed to produce in a span of three hours rendering the piece and do my best to get as much done for the coming Sunday.

My focus next week will be on values and rendering more basic forms from foundation patreon course and Ctrl+paint.

These rendering exercises have been challenging but a great learning experience and has helped me realise the importance of the underlying structure of the drawing.

Lines

My main focus this week has been to focus improving my digital sketching skills and line quality through building a portfolio piece and to design a prop/weapon concept. My initial goal was to create a concept for a crossbow and shield. However was not able to complete a crossbow due to time constraints and not full fill this deadline of one week. 

My initial target for the week was to also develop an eye to simplify forms into geometric shapes in perspective, which was considerably a struggle for me but a great learning experience and have considered to implement this practice each time i have a new assignment in future.

1. loose gesture sketch with broad charcoal like strokes ( fast to figure out general shape design

2. refined sketch (slow down to figure out rough design and proportion with aid of angles

3. geometric deconstruction of design in to basic forms in perspective and drawn with grid as best as possible (2d side front design) then 3/4 in to practice

4. refined clean line art of the subject

This assignment has given me an insight of how long i should be spending on certain tasks and to remember to organize a set to do list accordingly. If i was to revisit this assignment again i would try and extend it to 2 weeks rather than one- which i have decided to do and extend my time to create the . Hopefully designing this second man made prop will not be too time consuming since ive roughly sketch out a few concepts already with initial research. And since i have set another week till the following Sunday i shall try possibly implementing some 3D as a base to the concept for speed and quality of accuracy. 

My next set of class focus on schoolism will be value distribution with Jonathan Hardesty and do my best to complete his assignments accordingly for that week with the sunday as the deadline again.

Revisiting Fundamentals

It's the start of the new year and looking forward to what 2020 will bring for me. The last couple of days i have been revisiting my fundamentals and digital rendering techniques. It has taken many tries and many attempts to get angle and structure right therefore i looked back on a few schoolism classes by Jonathan Hardesty Essentials of realism which i would highly recommend for beginner artists because it covers the knowledge of proportion and accuracy so many of us tend to skip over and therefore go straight to rendering. Jumping ahead too quickly without a solid foundation and resulting in often not so satisfying results. There for i went back and tried to implement the three stage Block-In method recommended by Jonathan Hardesty a drawing process that i'm pretty familiar wirth used in classical atelier drawing, and proved to be great benefit in a of my recent drawing. Drawing form and structure is so crucial and evidently the most common flaw in many of my previous works and the ability to develop eye to extrapolate these concepts i have come to realise takes a great deal of time and extensively requires the artist to take opportunity to develop the observational skills to deconstruct the world around them for this is a important stepping stone in creating and designing a subject matter whether that is organic or man made/hard surface.

The task i have set to achieve these coming weeks is to also get better at rendering those forms and planes also by redoing an old assignment instructed by Sam Nielson, His knowledge and understanding of the fundamentals of light and how it interacts with objects is impeccable and mind blowing and feel i have learnt a great deal from practising these concepts that are often very simple to understand but difficult when putting into practice and applying to personal work. 

The images above are shots of what i manage to accomplish these last few day and feel i have a still great deal to learn about rendering but, definitely get a sense of what i should be practicing next. 

Another fellow artist and friend of mine has really pushed me to lengths which i could never have imagined and iam extremely thankful for and his willingness to give up his time to give feedback frequently.I have decided this month i will stick to studying some more black and white images and practice rendering out these basic forms in order to reach a standard where i feel i have grasped the ability to effectively paint these shapes without the necessity of relying of photos. 

Perhaps the next stage this coming week will be to review classes from John Parks Fundamentals group classes and get better at rendering the essential types of surfaces. But who know theres is also a lot i shall plan to be reviewing the next couple weeks including digital line art and rendering traditionally, huh.. now to see how i can manage to split up the time to allocate these practices is the real challenge that me including and many other artist struggle with. Any how till next time