SpareChange's book o' sketches

[SpareChange]

Hi guys, This year started studying DAE in belgium and I thought it couldn't hurt my improvement if i started posting some of my work on this site.

I've been drawing off and on for most of my life, but never got in to it very seriously. This year though, I'm really motivated and I hope to improve as much as possible.
My ultimate goal would be to become some kind of concept artist, but I realise this might be too much of an expectation. Anyway, now for the problem at hand.

In school we get a drawing assignement every week. We started with the basic blocks in perspective, but are now converting over to actual buildings. The assignement this week is to draw a "fantasy" bridge in two point perspective. There should also be some kind of watchtower.

I started thumbnailing with this as a result:

Next i picked one out who's feel I liked (the top left computer one) and took it to A3. Sadly, after spending an hour or so drawing the basis of the bridge in as close to perfect perspective as I could manage, I noticed my leftmost perspective point was too close and deforming the bridge too much.
As a result, I decided to just go wild on this one and draw out the rough idea in my head. This is were you guys come in .
Is there any help you can give me on the concept or the viewpoint? Or anything else for that matter.
It's supposed to be like this old bridge fallen into ruin were local people come to hang some type of prayer talisman thingies.

tl;dr:Have to draw bridge for school. What're your opinions on the idea?



P.S.: Sorry for the crappy camera pictures, scanner can't handle A3.

P.P.S: I'll try to get some other stuff from my sketchbook up later today.

[SpareChange]

So later today kind of turned into tomorrow. Sorry for that. But here some more of my sketches for those interested. As always, tips and critiques are very welcome.

This is just a random character


City scape from my imagination



This is supposed to be Levinas. It's not very good, but at least it made me realise how much i have to work on hands.


And then there's just these two random pages

[SpareChange]

Another day, another page of sketches. Gonna try to do a page a day, though it might get more difficult since I have to work primarily on the bridge assignement tommorow.
Oh well, we'll see.

I'm thinking I should draw with more direction though. Looking around other people sketchbooks I see a lot of studies. Got to find me a book methinks. Any tips on good books?

As always, comments, ideas, criticisms all welcome!

[SpareChange]

I thought I'd restart my sketchbok since we're starting to get into the more interesting stuff at school now. Hoping for some good critiques here.

The first one is an apple painting we did in class, I kinda like it but feel it could be improved on quite a bit?


Second one is the result of our city scene assignement. In my case it's a scene in taipei, taiwan.


The last one is a robot assignement. This was DRAWN BY OUR TEACHER and were supposed to shade it. I wanted to push my boundaries, so i went for drawing the flames and making that my lightsource. For now the only thing in the neighbourhood of being finished is the left leg.




Thanks for watching, and don't forget to leave a comment if you think there's any advice you can give me!

[SpareChange]

So I worked on the robot some more this week, as we had a review moment from our teaches today.
I personally thought it looked kinda decent, but the teachers disagreed and advised me to go for a more basic light source and do away with the flames altogether.
What irks me though, is that they didn't even tell me what was actually wrong with it, or told me how I should improve it. Although it's kind of understandable seeing how many students they have to take care of, but still...
I don't mind starting over and going with the simpler approach, but I just want to know what I did wrong. I was hoping you guys could help me out with this...




I also painted a pear for more practice.


Thanks for watching, comments are as always appreciated.

[SpareChange]

Worked hard on the robot last few days and finally got it to a state I can call finished. Probably not going to a lot more work on this one, but any advice or tips for the future are incredibly welcome.
Remember, line art done by my teacher.





Our final assignment has also been given, and it's an awesome one, so expect to see some progress on that one being posted up the coming weeks.
Thanks for coming by!

[SpareChange]

Our teacher taught us to do photo studies a few days ago, and said it was a good way to improve. So, I set out to do some. The first one is the one we did in class, the others I did on my own. Each took about 30 to 45 min.
Coments ,criticisms, yadayadayada. All welcome




Thanks foor looking.

[Lyno]

Hi SpareChange,

First of all, what you're doing here is called doing photo studies.
Some things:
-ALWAYS COMPARE VALUES OR COLORS TOO EACH OTHER.
-SEARCH FOR THE BIG SHAPES FIRST
-Think in terms of 'layers' when doing environments. Fore-, mid- and background
-Search for overlaps in the photos. I.e; the columns in the left photo study, they overlap the mid-and background, which creates depth and ties the image together.
-Details; you can say that the background contains less details then the foreground.
-If you feel comfortable enough doing greyscales, you can start doing photo studies in color also.

Nice going, keep them up!
Lino

[Slothstuff-J44]

Very nice lines you got there :3

[SpareChange]

Lyno, Slothstuff-J44 Thanks a lot for finally combo breaking my multi post

And Lyno, sorry for getting the terminology wrong. Guess I was mixing stuff from class up with stuff I talked about with my friends.

For all others reading this:
I started on our assignment for school. In short, we're supposed to design a carriage for a hero archetype of our choosing from a list of ten. I had no idea which one to pick, so I started with thumbnailing 10 designs for each of them, hoping I'd know what to pick after that. So that didn't work out.. Maybe you guys can help?

Second is another photo study. I feel like I'm getting closer to the actual values, but I'm still off by quite a bit. Am i missing something or is this just practice and repetition?
Also, i feel like I'm having trouble defining stuff. Now I know this isn't really that big of a problem in the studies, since I'm doing it mostly to get my values down, but I got a comment about this on my robot assignment as well. Any ideas how to fix this?
Thanks in advance!




Thanks for stopping by!

[Somelar]

Hi, mate!

I think you are on right track with practicing basic stuff as shapes and perspective etc first berfore jumping right into "crazy concept art".
And try to not use too complicated forms (as wizard castles etc) for perspective / composition practices. It's easyer to develop basic skills when you are not fustrated about not getting it right as in LoTR or something.
Keep it up. It comes...

[ninaren]

Hey nice start on your SB, I drew alot when I was a younger kid but then I kinda lost it in my teens and then I came back to it for a while ago.
I think that you are on the right track and I like the perspective drawings you do. Be patient and practise alot (thats something I have to tell myself too) ^^
As Somelar said, start with basic stuffs, basic forms and in time you can do "crazy concepts". Study from life, books, imagination and try to understand why things looks the way they do.
Keep it up!

[SpareChange]

So, exams are over...
Here's the result of the assignment I had to do. I'll go in more detail at a later time

[SpareChange]

Ok, I'm back!

So first I'll give you a very late quick rundown on my previous post.

What you are seeing is the final handed in sheets for my carriage assignment. Personally, I'm pretty pleased with it, but looking back at it I believe it would have been better if I had made the front part just slightly longer. The final shading is also not on the level I would've wanted. This is probably because it was kind of rushed the night before the due date... Really gotta get my time management together.

Now for the new stuff!

First of all I've got my new assignment to show you guys. We're supposed to make a painting of a church being discovered years from now after it was covered in desert sand.
I started with a basic line art, and then I did some light studies. This is were I could use your guys' help. My teacher preferred the bottom left one (with some contrast adjustments). I was wondering if you had a different opinion, and if so why. Any new ideas or other advice is also more than welcome.



Lastly I've also got this dragon I painted in between working on the church thingy. It actually ended up a being a lot of fun, so I think I'm gonna try to do more of these kind of things. Again, any help and critiques welcome.




I've also been sketching a lot more, doing some gesture studies and stuff. I'll see if I can get around to scanning some pages of my sketchbook.

Thanks for stopping by!