Evidence for the Group-game

As you probably would have guessed, I am one of the two concept artists for my group.

The group is doing a trailer for a game that we don't have time making,so we had to spring for the next best thing.

Our trailer is based off on an island environment, and I was tasked with producing concept designs that were tropical based.

At first, I was tasked to look at a Japanese houses, especially the wooden one's.

As you can see, there were some interesting designs I stumbled upon when looking at Japan, by the third drawings I stopped coping what I saw on the screen and do a free-draw, taken from a little bit of gathered knowledge that I had acquired from looking at passed images. The last drawing, I draw showed me that houses didn't have to follow the typical design and can be quite creative... that and anything looks good in white.

I submitted this image to our group Google  Hangout group, this is basically something that lets us all stay in contact with each other, even out of class and submit work to each other.

I was than, asked to produce several images of a Palm tree, so I want to research several images of palm trees and this was the end result.

While I was drawing, I realized that that the outline of palm tree is actually incredible simple, especially when it comes to the leaves, without my knowledge, I started using this technique that I developed years ago back in secondary school in Art class, I had complete forgotten about it until I started to draw these palm trees.

I uploaded this onto Google Hangout, and than I was asked to draw some tropical houses, to me it was a sign that the group was starting to get the feel of what they actually wanted, so I started moving away from the basic Japanese house and into a more tropical based environment.

This was my first drawing and I will be straight with you.

I was complete dissatisfied with the end result, at first I thought that I could get away with drawing buildings just by sketching, after all, it had worked pretty well with the other buildings I had done in the past, only for this drawing to prove me wrong.

So very wrong.

My teammates were satisfied with it, while I was not, I was half tempted to rip out the page and start a new but I didn't.

The next image was a sketch of me exploring a more open world.

As you can see, everything is reduce to very simple shapes, I didn't go into an untold amount of detail when I produced this and made lots of interesting lines, it was quiet fun to produce something not as detail as my previous drawings, where I could be more free with my line work.

I than moved on to more building work, praying that I had improved and it wasn't as bad as my first one.

This was me, exploring the idea of booth made out of wood, I've seen a lot of food stands and booths in the past. I even modeled a wooden bucket in the past for Game development, which really helped with the wooden planks. I also noticed a change with my shading technique, how I didn't shade so heavily when it came to the bottom two.

But I was still very dissatisfied with my work, I wondered how I could make my buildings and drawings look more realistic, and that's when I remembered several YouTube tutorials that I looked up in my second year of animation in the past. I noticed that all the professional drawers used a ruler and made a dot, where the lines would start from and their drawings will develop from that.

It was actually the same as what I learnt in Herbert lesson on prospective recently, and i thought why not, try to adding this to my drawings? After all, if professional drawers were saying the same thing that Herbet, than they had to know what they were talking about.

I tried this out once years back and it didn't go so well for me. so I was a bit weary of trying my hand at it again.

After all, what was the worst that could happen?

I was in shock.

I couldn't believe the difference using a ruler made to my drawings, when I compared these two to my previous drawings, there was such a large difference between them. 

Who would have though that using a ruler made my current drawings look a lot more 3D and it add the realism that I didn't know I could achieve until that moment.

By this point, I was looking at my ruler like it was heaven sent.

I started to realise why people used a blue pencil before going over it in ink, a blue pencil was there for sketching while ink was to make it look very nice and final.

It was the same when it came to ruler, it made the final image look very nice compared to what I would have been if it was all sketched out.

From that moment on, I wonder what would happen if i used two prospective lines to create one single image and this was the result.

It certain turned out better than when I last attempted a two pointed prospective, official drawing, the lines provided me with a much more accurate shape for the hammock, at that moment, I felt like a took a huge step forward on my road to becoming an animator in the drawing department, and the next drawing I did, proved me correct.

This drawing, confirmed to me, that I should be using a ruler from now on, that and I need to seriously learn how to scan my images into the machine, I've seen the difference and it would be nice to have several scanned images appear on my blog because the line work is much bolder compared to when I take pictures straight from my phone.

Now armed with a ruler and rubber, I was than tasked to draw boats.

The bottom was a lot more sketch based but I did use ruler to map out my boat shape, I can defiantly see the improvement in my drawings.

So from now on, I'm going to use a ruler more often, especially when it comes to objects.