Today I set out to apply some of the techniques I learnt yesterday to concept creatures and characters. I also wanted to try creating a more characterised face in 3D, trying to treat it as if it were low poly and use simpler shapes rather than fine detail.
In the morning I assembled a Mood Board, searching for creatures that i found interesting or thought had some unique designs, ones that push the design to the limit. Some are more realistic, such as the bottom left, where as other , like the bottom right are more extreme. I planned to use this to try the character design phase on creation.
Then i continued parts of the tutorial i started yesterday, trying a silhouette based creation method, building up tone from a solid silhouette, that accurately showed the shapes id be using. It was an interesting method and think it may be of more merit when trying to figure out broad shapes in a design, where as the line method would be more useful if i already knew what the details and shapes would be, and was just doing a study.
Until now my style has been mostly surreal or hyper realistic over the last few years, so experimenting in different styles and trying to broaden my art capabilities will be very important and hopefully have a knock on effect across my whole portfolio. As the start of that journey i have drawm some character faces that were more exaggerated.
After yesterdays sculpt i wanted to explore a ore exaggerated style, and though i liked some of the other sketches more, i haven’t done much sculpture of female faces so wanted to push myself with one of the more androgynous faces to see if i could still portray the femininity in 3D. I think i was moderately successful but the skin doesnt look particularly smooth and the eyes make it look a bit more masculine than the drawing.
I then used the Mood Board to apply one of the character creation methods i learned today. The end result was quite generic, and i’m going to retry again tomorrow to see if i can push the design further and into a more unique path.
Spit Paint today : Darkening Sun – This one was challenging and i think i made the composition , lighting and colour pretty far wrong to be honest. I wasn’t happy how it turned out, but i did research and learn a new method to paint clouds, which seemed effective had the colours been so bizarre, and with smaller sections rather than the whole sky.
Dominic Crofts Honours Blog 