Goodbye Sir Jeffers

   This weeks been an interesting one, an intensive visual design workshop....because well collectively we suck a little too much. I do say this knowing full well in how many areas I fall short, you know, before anyone gets offended. Now for an intensive workshop this has actually been a pretty fun project. Essentially using silhouettes and very basic shapes in order to build up a vehicle design. Seemed a tall order at first until it all started to click. 

 I've never tried either these techniques or designed a vehicle before so this is all fairly new to me and even the digital painting, while something I've played around with is certainly something I'm not that good at. I mean I can't paint with a brush and that seems like a fundamental thing to understand before being any good at the digital equivalent. 

 Ended up creating a glider of sorts, really basic considering how every vehicle I've seen so far from anybody else has been a high tech sort of affair. Though I did find myself inspired by the forms of hand made guitars and violins, that sort of stuff. Seems like it lean't itself better to a more old timey design.

 

   I ain't gonna lie, for a while the design had no purpose. Which is a bit awkward, I mean after all things like this are generally made with a specific goal in mind. Hard to design something if you have no use in mind for it. A little later though things started to take shape. It's a fairly classy looking craft, somewhere between a glider, a gondola and an engraved classical guitar. To me it does look hand made, as though it's a labour of love by a dedicated craftsman.   

 At some point mid way through the design I just happened upon the thought of that Red Bull event where folks from all over create those completely impractical flying machines and throw themselves off a pier. Now I got to thinking, what would be a more dangerous idea. Throwing yourself off a waterfall would do it, a big one at that. So the concept arose of a sport in which people build these, crafts that they really do put effort and dedication into and then try to fly off the edge of a furious torrent of cascading water and land into the river below, seeing how fair they can make it. Adds a nice aspect to it as well if you consider messing it up means the loss of a craft you could have spent a year putting together yourself. Alright idea I thought, still can't paint mind. 

 

Gesture is One Third the Battle

   Now I ain't been using the blog entirely as effectively as I could be. We got told pretty early on that besides blog tasks and the documentation of various aspects of our work, that we should use it as an expression of our creative identities. What makes us tick so to speak. Now there's a thousand things I could talk about but I think I've finally come across something that I actually want to share.

 It's no secret to anyone who knows me that I really enjoy our weekly life drawing sessions, hell just drawing the figure in general is a nice treat. There's a tonne of techniques that come into these lessons but I'm going to get into gesture drawings for the time being. Gesture drawings are a great way of telling if someone has a good knowledge of most aspects of figure drawings. You have to get all the rhythm down in an incredibly limited amount of time and with minimal but entirely effective mark making. When done well gesture drawings are immense pieces of work in their own right, it's almost musical, bringing to mind the blues masters who started to bare their soul with three chords and a guitar with four broken strings. When you can get that quality with what seems to the ignorant eye to be a monumental level of simplicity you've pretty much cracked it. Which is difficult for me as a progressive metal head to say. I'm usually all about the technical.

 Can get round to showing you what I wanted to now anyway. I found this animator called Ryan Woodward while I was having a raz round for some gesture drawing exercises. On the side he does a body of work called Conte Animated. Which as the name suggests are gesture drawings completed with conte sticks. You know what you can just have a look see.

  How cool are those? It's a hypothetical question I suppose but I can't get enough of them. For sure a technique I want to try for myself. I mean I'm sure there are other artists that approach their gestures in a similar way but I just love the sense of form he managed to get with the blocks of tone that he throws in. Just badass. Even took some of these gestures and made an animation out of them. I'll throw that below along with a link to his two websites. Check it out you won't be sorry.

http://ryanwoodwardart.com/

http://conteanimated.com/

Elements

   You know what? 3D work is kinda fun...I mean I still ain't great at it but I'm starting to enjoy it all the same. Probably a good thing too considering it might land me a kick ass job. Course I still suck at it pretty bad but I dunno just the tiniest bit is starting to click and that feels pretty good. Just have to stick at it with a bit more vigor and I reckon I can get somewhere with it.

 So here we can see a couple of trees and the building 

I had to re-submit. Even added all those lovely bumps and specs that I completely ignored the first time. So yea, that's all this time round.