Hello everyone! I finally decided to create an account and share my sketches! I'm really hyped right now.
[A quick backstory: roughly six months ago, as I'm typing this, I decided to switch careers (currently ui design) and start learning how to draw. (If you're interested in my journey up to this point, you can look it up here). At the moment I'm really focusing on learning the fundamentals. If anyone is doing the same stuff and would like to talk drawing, just shoot me a message! Im always happy to have some cool conversations!]
Currently Im participating in the Foundation Program by John Park. Its really great so far, last terms assignment was redesigning an existing building in a western theme. I chose to redesign one of the oldschool Motels, I though it'd be really interesting to reimagine the big signs they always feature.
I don't know much about building design but this is so clear and so detailed that if I were looking for design for game/film environments, this would be what I'm looking for. I should like to see more of your work!
Thank you both, very kind of you, I'm glad you like it :) This piece is a small milestone for me, never struggled so much and put in so much effort. But I think in the end it was worth it.
Sooo, here are some of the latest sketches I did for my environment class. Some random doodles exploring forms and plank usage and a lot of „thinking-sketches“.
Currently I’m working on the "Envirnonment Lighting" assignment for Foundation Group and I realized I never did any environmental stuff, so its very hard for me to draw an actual scene or create an environment (which you obviously need to apply lighting). So I started figuring out how to get there. I used the previous foundation courses on that specific topic and all the stuff I could find on the internet.
But I really struggled to imagine the space and composing an appalling scene. Long story short, I searched for reference to find out how different shots work. Thats were my „thinking sketches“ come into place. Breaking the shots down and thinking about what they are doing really helped me understanding what questions to ask before doing thumbnails.
And thats one of the key takeaways for me: Asking Questions before starting to thumbnail to find out what I want. The single most useful question to me was: What do I want to see? That helped me A LOT. I really struggled to arrange everything because I didn’t know what I wanted to see.
I want to see a knight returning to his castle.
I want to see a person in front of a building washing some clothes.
I want to see a man entering a big city for the first time.
That really helped me to understand what I want to communicate.
So, next steps: Figuring out what I want to see and then compose my shots accordingly, so that they clearly show that main subject and support its message.
Hey there Miracoly, really nice line work here. It's really interesting do see your perspective grids as I am trying to level up my environment skills as well. Nice work, looking forward to more from you mate.
“Today, give a stranger one of your smiles. It might be the only sunshine he sees all day.” -- H. Jackson Brown Jr.
@tbnkaron Not yet, barely find time to draw at the moment, but in the future I'll definitely try to do it, heard only great things about doing that. :)
Following up my last post I pushed my environments a bit further. I started by defining what I want to see: A big gate marking the town entrance.
Then I did some basic boxy thumbnails to explore some compositions. Its really cool to explore different scenarios, a lot of fun trying things out and look how they turn out.
After that I started doing some studies for the big gate to find a design direction. After that I made some more detailed thumbs from my favourite compositions.
Finally I settled on my favourite thumbnail and did a more refined sketch. That process was really exciting for me. I never did a complex drawing like that traditionally. But I really like that, its quite meditative to refine a drawing over and over again.
Glad to see you also here, I remember you from CA, am I wrong? :D
Really like how you managed your perspective with those environment study, strong line confidence! I need to do some more refined drawings too!
Keep it going dude :)
Wow so much patience and focus needed to pull that off! Props to you, result looks really nice! Designing the gate before fitting it into the drawing was a really smart process. I should try an approach like that too. How are your lighting skills? You could throw some value on that in photoshop and really see it come alive ^^
Thank you AlCo! Yes, you're right, also on ca.org :)
Also thank you JyonnyNovice, really appreciate your kind words! And perfect timing with your post. Currently I'm working on lighting thumbnails for my comps, hopefully I'm able to show some at the end of the week :) Just learning working with value and light, so it gives me quite a hard time.
I didn't use a lightbox, I just started with a graphite pencil to lay in the perspective and basic geometry and then used my ballpoint to refine.
Quick update. Currently I'm in the great spot to have a full week of free time aka drawing time. Besides my foundation stuff I decided to kick off a side project I wanted to do for a loong time. I always wanted to work more intense on the vehicle stuff from scotts book, so I gave me a little brief and started ideating.
Brief was something along this lines:
- Light to medium truck with 6 wheels
- Purpose: Scouting new terrain with chance of encountering enemies (military nuance)
- Crew: 2-4
- Diesel Engine
- Small Storage
- Near Future (20+ years)
I started with a lot of marker silhouettes and then chose one I liked and began refining. Actually I'm 50% happy with the results :D I think it has a lot of potential but a lot of the forms are too scattered and not in sync, but I will continue refining those sketches.
Looks great! Maybe use some negative space some more within the main part of the vehicle. I think in the last two the back wheels stick out too far, or if it's a step for the troops maybe add a hand rail or something so that wheel doesn't float so much. The design of no. 3 on the page before works really nice. Sticking an exhaust on the top, like in your notes, could work nice and make the silhouette more interesting.
Now you've done the hard part, you could try tracing over your designs and see what shapes there are within it, without getting distracted by the details. Think about big, medium, small shapes and negative space and whether you can make the design more interesting varying those.
Something like this:
then you can play around with them, pushing and pulling and adapting them and then figure out how to clearly seperate them from each other so they read as separate shapes. It can also be helpful to draw just the silhouette filled with black and see how it reads.
(maybe you already thought about all this stuff, just a few suggestions in case you didn't : ) )
Man thats really great feedback! Always post that, it helps me a lot! I think you have very valid points here, especially separating forms is a big issue.
Thanks a lot for helping me, I really appreciate your efforts. Now its time to work on the next round of designs, I'll keep you posted!
Awesome sketchbook Miracoly! Your line drawings look really good, and your workflow seems to be very functional as well. Can't wait to see more stuff! :D
Thanks zoylster! Really appreciate your feedback. Hopefully I'll be able to make up some free time for this sideproject. At the moment I'm quite busy with my environment stuff.
Also thanks jekjan! I'm glad you like it!
Quick update: At the moment I'm doing stuff for the environment class here on CD and to complement that I decided to approach it traditionally. So I got myself some colors and a few brushes and started painting. And I LOVE THAT. I'm really inspired by the stuff from James Gurney and I plan on going outside and paint on location. This on is a photo study to get used to the medium.
Awesome! So great to do this stuff traditionally ^^ is that gouache? Me too I love James Gurney's little travelling sketchbook paintings, you can feel like a real explorer when you do that stuff : ) You're painting is great, just the mountain doesn't feel like it's really set back - although the illusion of it works since we know it's there in the back. It probably wasn't as dark a value in reality as it looks on the photo - since they probably increased the contrast - so having it a bit lighter would help, as well as keeping the shadow parts of the mountain in a cool tone (although maybe you did that warm to cool mountain shadows purposely to make the feeling of the mountain rolling away from us at the top?).
The landscape I need to paint in my watercolour class next week is similar to that (with the bands of grass and dotted flowers and some tiny very distant mountains), check and see how mine comes out when it's done : )
Hey man, thanks for visiting my SB! Your stuff looks cool, keep it up!! It looks like you are really going after those fundamentals. Those will really make a difference for your designs.
I have some crit on the Western Town Entry. It's a cool design, and I like the Western style buildings. But the perspective is skewed. I drew some quick perspective lines over this to show you.
Did you intend this to be in one or two point perspective? The walls recede to a VP off to the left, and this holds across the entire front wall. But then we have a full frontal one point view down the street. If you can see a 1 pt. view down the street, the walls would be parallel to your picture plane and there would be no left vanishing point. If you could see the walls converging to the left, the right vanishing point would be placed more to the right. It just doesn't look right.
I'm guessing you were trying to put this in a 2 point view with a very shallow convergence on the walls, with the camera located a bit at an angle to the street. In that case the view down the street wouldn't be a frontal 1 pt. view. You also got a bit confused with your boardwalk on the right- it almost seems to want to converge to a third vanishing point to the right, which makes no sense. It looks like you got a bit confused as to whether this was supposed to be a one point or two point view. Perspective can be quite difficult sometimes. ^^
Basically, if you were to have this view down the street, the walls would be in boring one point perspective and never converge. If you had a view of the walls converging, you couldn't see straight down the street like this, as you would be at an angle to the gate. Just put this into a proper 1 pt. view and it would be quite correct. If you want a 2 pt. view you will lose much of the view down the street. Also bear in mind that if you go outside of the area encompassed by the two perspective points in a 2 pt. view, the drawing will get distorted!
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, you can see that not all your lines converge correctly (like the ones I outlined in purple). When doing this freehand, you have to estimate perspective and it doesn't matter if it isn't totally mathematically perfect. As long as it looks right to the viewer, we're good. But some of these are visibly off. It's made more obvious by the skewed perspective. If the overall perspective was right and a few lines were a wee bit off, it wouldn't break it. But just keep an eye out for it, and try to make sure every line gets close enough to look right to the viewer.
I suggest you look into Scott Robertson's Basic Perspective Form Sketching DVD from Gnomon, it is great. He shows you how to construct freehand perspective grids. If you can construct a correct perspective grid, everything you build on that will be correct as well. For more knowledge on perspective, I recommend David Chelsea's Perspective For Comic Book Artists, it's the best book I ever read on the subject!
I wish I could be more helpful, but I'm learning perspective myself right now and I only know enough to be dangerous. ^^
"Drawing is a skill like hammering a nail. You might not be great at it yet, but there is nothing stopping you from gettin' down and hammering away." -Irshad Karim
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