Owl Character Progression.

Wanting to progress my characters so I can begin finalising the designs, I concentrated on creating a small expression sheet for the Owl character I've been working on. Here I focused mainly on experimentation of potential facial features as well as body shape and posture. I've yet to figure out the exact fashion for the Owl, but as the facial expression and features are what I'd like to take forward into a minor sculpting project, this is what I've been making sure to concentrate on. I will of course figure out the Owls personality and role in the bird city as a whole, as I'd like for my designs to have backstory, justification and a sense of three dimensional depth to their characterisations.

I chose three expressions to work on in Photoshop that, between them, showed the most diversity; neutral, shocked and annoyed. I also chose a full body sketch to show the kind of proportions I'm looking at, at the moment.
My next steps from this will be finalising the design, confirming the personality and characterisation, then sketching out a final expression sheet in order to begin sculpting. I think this order is quite important, as I want to have the personality and characterisation fleshed out before I start thinking how this character would expression emotion.

Miranda and Prospero Final Designs.

Costume Details:

Miranda has a blue painted on Earth symbol on her shoulder plate, that she painted on there when bored one day. Shows she’s creatively minded, curious of her home planet, proud of heritage.

Miranda has a better suit than Prospero, as he gives her the better things, and repairs his own with patches. 

The waist armor Prospero has is assembled from broke ship parts. 

Miranda always carries a medical kit, as her dad demand she be ready at all times in case she gets hurt. Shows protective tendencies from father. 

They have similar chest pieces but Prospero’s contains his badges from career. 

Circular patches on knees are elbows designed to cushion, protect and lengthen life of fabric in these wear and tear areas. 

Miranda’s suit is green to show her trainee status. Prospero’s is navy to show higher ranking. 

Suit and Ship Concept Art

This design concentrated on expressing personality through formation of posing the character, as well as developing aspects of costume, e.g. the suit, breathing system and helmet. At this point in the project I reaffirmed with myself that making each of these costume aspects in the designated time period was slightly unrealistic, and setting goals of priority was necessary. These ordered as: 1) Designing, sewing and completed the jumpsuit. 2) Sourcing, designing and restyling a helmet. 3) Potential armor pieces, or sections of costume that weren't to be crafted from fabric through sewing. 

Another potential space craft design, inspired by the bio-luminescent mushrooms being researched as part of the eco-system for the environment of the planet. 

Temper05 Spacecraft Design

Original design for scouting spacecraft used in my transposal of 'The Tempest.' Supposedly a small scouting vehicle, built for two people with a small amount of emergency supplies. Incapable of space travel, designed to roam and explore planet surfaces.

Specialist Pathway: Environment concept art.

Two pieces of concept art done in order to explore the environment of the planet I was creating as a set for my interpretation of 'The Tempest.' Looking at both the planet as a whole and the climate on land itself.
The image on top was drawn with reference to other artists work through research of planet surfaces.

Character Concept Art; The Tempest.

Ariel concept art for interpretation of 'The Tempest' from the project I've just completes at university. 

Thought it a good time to begin getting into regular blog updates again, as blogging will be a part of the module next term, there's no time like the present to attempt turning it into a regular habit! 

My idea for Ariel was that instead of being a fantasy based ethereal spirit or fairy, instead they're a piece of non-physical software or interface, that can be seen to the audience and characters as a hologram. 

Caliban concept art.
After being referred too as 'moon-calf' from one of the other characters, I decided to incorporate bovine features into my interpretation of the monster Caliban. 
The symbols seen are representative of the planets Earth and Saturn, which are the planets I drew inspiration from during the design period of this project. Having tattoos or brand marks also show ownership to Prospero, who calls to him as his slave. The scythe is used to both defend from unknown monsters on the planet, and harvest food for the humans Caliban serves. No breathing apparatus is needed for this character as he is native to the planet. 

Specialist Pathway: Costume Bible Sheet and Orthographic.

Front, side, back and side arm view of costume concept for current university project: Transposing Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' into my chosen theme of 50's retro futurism.

Digital Art; Master Studies.

Lesson 4, Term 2 of Concept art. 

Taking a break from our main project of adapting the opera 'Bluebeard's Castle,' we began concentrating on master studies; analysing the work of master artists. In this case, John Singer Sargent, William Merritt and Rembrandt. 

Through different pieces, we were challenged in a variety of ways to explore colour and composition, either through taking away usage of the colour picker tool or solely focusing on working in black and white. 

The piece pictured here is a self portrait by William Merritt, (top left) that I chose to study for both the colour and the consistency of the brushstrokes; a sketchy/ impressionistic style I really liked. 

The techniques I learnt in this lesson that helped me to attain a good interpretation where:

1) Flipping the image vertically. This took focus away from what the piece was supposed to look like, (a portrait) and made me look at form and placement instead. This was very effective for me, as I no longer viewed it as a face but as shapes to concentrate on. When re-flipped, I could then adjust and neaten, then flip back to the upside down position and carry on. 

2) Black and white filter. This took concentration away from tone and meant I was able to focus on shading, whether something needed to be lighter or darker, and again drew more attention to shape and composition than drawing in colour would have done. 

The finished piece; I'm really pleased with how the tones came out seeing as I didn't use the colour picker for this piece. The only thing I would change is the angle of the head, and maybe thinning the face out a bit too. Overall, I'm happy with this outcome as it's also one of the first portrait pieces I've copied rather than drawn over/ traced a base shape from, so in practise of composition I feel this exercise was very valuable.

Digital Art; Drawing from Photos

As a change from drawing still life objects, we were challenged in class to draw a still form a film or movie. I chose an image from one of my favourite TV shows, 'Hannibal' as I liked the shapes seen here, and wanted to concentrate on form and composition. Because of this I think choosing a scenery to draw instead of a face worked better for what I wanted to practise.  

 I began my sketch by planning out the basic shapes, and using the colour picker to select key tones. At the beginning, I wanted to include the specific shapes of the horns and further in I realised how many beams there are! However, as I drew more of the picture I realised how difficult and time consuming adding all these little details in would be, especially for a simple sketch.

 Finished drawing: I found out that by concentrating on the shapes instead of counting the details, I was able to create a much more effective sketch a lot quicker. Even though the antlers aren't obviously antlers, it's the form; sharp, spiky, spread out fingers across the image. This created a much more stylised piece, but still conveyed the space and dark mood of the room.

As my first scenery styled drawing, I'm happy with the outcome, and I learnt a new way of drawing to create the scope of space.

Digital Art; Life Drawing, Pears.

In order to get a better understanding of digital art, we had a class on life drawing. This helped with both getting to grips with different elements of Photoshop, and also allowed me to look into techniques of shadows and highlights. Above is the original image I started from.

 By switching into a black and white filter, I was able to pick out shadows and different tones through the image a lot more accurately than when it was colour.

Finished drawing: As a first piece of life drawing I'm pleased with how it came out. I think the shapes and colouring where the aspects that turned out best, but I should have looked deeper into the composition of the original photo, as the pears don't quite line up in the same way. Overall though, I'm happy with the drawing, and  I can see where I need to improve in the future.