Week 6 - Guildhall Visit, Life Drawing, Stylised Rock & Gurus Project

Guildhall Visit

This week I continued on visiting the guildhall and have completed more studies, and drawings of textures. I didn't capture enough surface detail in the first  3 drawings, as I picked incorrect distance to draw from. 

On the next 4 drawings I started to look for some more interesting surfaces, with unique details such as cracks, nails and cut marks. I also drew the surface of a sofa chair, which had buttons positioned inside these indented, circular areas. It is the 3rd drawing below.

Below are a few more drawings of certain areas and spots around the guildhall, thayt caught my attention.

After drawing these studies, I’ve spent some time on selecting the most interesting area of this guildhall. Then gathered additional reference to paint it digitally. I was fairly inexperienced in digital painting, which was why I decided on doing my work this way. I wanted to challenge my skills, to push myself further, as I could have only improved by practicing more.

My final digital study turned out pretty accurate, although I think I could have worked more on its colours, as they looked faded and desaturated. This caused my study to look like it was partly in greyscale.

The brush strokes are not too visible either. It may be a good point as it adds more realism to this painting; but I consider it a negative, as I was not trying to lose the painted style and yet I did. It may have been caused by me being more adapted to painting on a real canvas, with a physical surface finish and texture. I will need to work more on transferring my traditional skills into my digital work. Apart from this, I should consider working with a larger brush, or maybe using lower canvas resolution to make my marks and details more visible.

Life Drawing

Since the past week, I have drawn additional 12 studies from observation. Most of those were drawn with a 2B graphite pencil and focused on people walking through a shopping mall in Leicester. A few others were drawn using blue and red coloured pencils. The subjects in some of these were my class mates, who joined me on that drawing trip.

In most cases I didn't have enough time to draw anyone properly and I resorted to using continuous line, which again proved to be a quick and effective technique. The studies drawn in this style lacked depth, but depicted a lot of my subjects’ figures. 

A few of the last drawings I’ve done while sitting down in a coffee shop. These were more accurate and rendered as I could take more time on those, most of my subjects stayed in their positions for a longer time. I still felt that I could have done better with some of those, if I just spent a few more minutes on them, but I didn’t have the chance to do so since my subjects moved eventually. I will try to improve my timing on these kinds of drawings on my next trips.

Stylised Rock

Concept & Hand painted foam model

I decided last week to go with the teardrop shaped rock idea. It was not easy to make a model of it, as I quickly learned that producing something stylised was a tougher challenge than expected. My problem was mainly in digitally producing a hand painted, stylised texture as it is something new to me. I think I have managed to make a better physical model, than the digital one. The reason is I felt more confident painting with a physical brush and applying it to a hand-carved surface. I will need to experiment more with digital painting, in order to have a better understanding of it and develop more confidence in using it.

Lastly, I wanted to create a gloss map for the gem stones, in my digital rock model, but I couldn’t find the right way of making the look how I wanted; painting the gems correctly was much easier to me on the physical model. Eventually I decided to not use the gloss map, leaving the gem shapes look empty and fairly flat. I think this will be another area to work on, to experiment more with creating gloss and specular levels in my textures.

Unwrapped texture of my stylised rock model.

Portal Inspired Arcade Game Cabinet

Continuing on my project for Gurus and Grasshoppers, I moved onto modelling in 3DS Max. The beginning was tough as I needed to plan out (using my concept) how many segments I would roughly need, to get the right arch on my arcade cabinet’s back section. Apart from that, I needed to make sure the polygons were arranged so that I could fit the robotic eye shape there, without any obvious seams or edges showing, as it needed to resemble the Portal character, GLaDOS.

One part that I found easy was modelling the display; it was fairly easy and straightforward; however deciding on how it should be positioned and fitted into the main body was not. It required being at a certain angle, that would be comfortable for the user to view. It was an important aspect that shouldn’t be avoided, as adjusting it correctly would greatly improve my model and make it more believable.