In life drawing today, we worked mainly on the longer poses, most of them consisted of 8 - 10 minute poses which was great, because I have been wanting to do some more drawings which will enable me to get into some different mediums of art. I decided to use willow charcoal today, I have found that by changing materials, you adapt to each one differently and each medium uses its own special technique. For example, with charcoal, i like to smudge and use my eraser for highlights, where as with pencil, i like to cross hatches shade, and outline my work using a 5mm HB led mechanical pencil. So each approach is always different.
I found today's lesson quite enlightening, iv'e been struggling to understand the method of measuring using the length of the pencil with a fully extended arm. This is done to get a sense of scale and knock down the fundamental proportions of a figure. I am so use to creating my own illustrations form eye, working like this proved itself difficult, but i am happy with the results of my work, even if they don't look brilliant, I think I am improving when I compare my more recent work to my older pieces.
Task 4
This week we had a little insight about how the people on my course including me, as 3D Artists, are to try and make our way into the industry and what approaches we should take if we want to be concept artists. As an artist it is our duty to constantly be observing minute detail, and trying to get a good grasp of the fundamentals of all things; How they are constructed and the perspective they they are in.
Concept designers are people that completely open their mind to anything and everything creative to allow new ideas flow into their minds broadening their creative scope. This allows the designer to create innovative ideas that could really inspire and captivate their audience, but how do they get to that stage?
Through hard work, constantly practising their traditional skills such as life drawing and transposing it to character design or environment design. They are training their mind to understand the fundamentals of traditional art, no artist can draw or create a masterpiece without using reference, Pacasso and Michael Angelo didn't, they all used reference material to aid them through their work and its exactly the same for everyone in the media and games industry.
Producing good work doesn't necessarily mean that concept artist has to produce flawless line work and seamless character designs, in fact most concept stages start out with quite choppy drawings that look very sketchy. This adds a level of authenticity to the drawings.
The point is, the idea of these life drawing sessions, is to hone our skills and allow us to understand the fundamentals of how the anatomy of the human body works, even when creating simplistic Chibi style characters like Mickey Mouse, you still need a firm grip of anatomy to understand how the character would move and what it would look like if it were to be animated. Understanding the human structure allows you to then go on to learn about the anatomy of animals and even made up organic creatures. It applies to all forms of character art.
Our main task for this week was to create three anatomical studies of the feet, I decided to find a female friend of mine and politely ask her whether it would be okay to do a anatomical drawing study of her feet, I was shocked and delighted to hear that she said yes!
Below are three drawings that i created using a Mechanical 9mm B lead pencil, I decided to use thicker lines for my drawing to add some definition overall I'm quite satisfied with the three studies but I'm a little disappointed that they didn't turn out as well as I hoped. none the less, I have enjoyed this task as drawing feet was where i actually fell back.
Here you can see the there drawings that I have created, I tried to do different angles of these feet but it was proved difficult as I'm a slow drawer so it would have been annoying for the model to be standing for a long period of time, so i had her prop her foot up on a cushion.
Zbrush Torso
Today we were given a Zip file containing the base meshes for guide planes, and a 7.5 and 8 head high human, although the models were androgynous, I decided to sculpt mine into a female because everybody else chose to do a male and i wanted to stand out and try to challenge myself, there was also less reference about, i have discovered that the female anatomy is far more subtle than male musculature, so it was interesting creating the model.
I started out first of all by importing the models, by importing them both, then turning them both into sub tools, i was able to draw them on the canvas both at the same time, this allowed me to place the guide planes in the right areas of the human torso. As you can see on the left, the guide planes are perfectly translated in the 3D space, now as useful as they are, i decided to turn them off, I found them far too distracting and they got in the way a little bit when I was trying to work, I didn't really use them at all.
The next thing we learnt whilst in the software was the use of the transposition tool. by enabling this tool and selecting scale or move, is proviced a slider that you can tailor to the size of your character, and by manipulating each controler, it affects the movement and scale of the model, so resizing the model is a very easy thing to do. It provides a lot of leeway and it is very stable. 
Now that everything is set up, its time to subdivide the model, but not too much, we want it to be blocky so we can get the fundamental landmarks in. To subdivide, go to Geometry on the right tool palette and hit 'Divide'. When you are sculpting, by hitting "Shift + D" you can go down a sub division, and to go up again simply press "D".
When i had completed those steps, i selected the clay tubes brush (best for blocking out) and started sculpting in the main areas, such as he stomach muscles, consisting of the 'rectus abdominous' and the 'external obliques'.
Next week there will be participially no lessons at all, so i will use all of that time to practice using Zbrush, trying to get my model to a high standard and get some anatomically correct sculpting finished to show Tian for feedback.
No comments:
Post a Comment