Term 6, Intro to Concept Art, Week 4
For a description of this unit see my Intro to Concept Art unit plan. For full context, see the description of my Art Home School Curriculum.
Retrospective
This was a fun week. I think if I was forced to choose an art career path today, between illustrator, comic book artist, fine artist, and concept artist, I would choose concept artist, especially since that’s my best shot at getting a job as an artist. I’m going to keep doing design projects as a part of every unit and see if that maintains my interest.
Log
I was on vacation this week so I had plenty of time for drawing. If only every week were vacation week…
Drawings and Critiques
Monday, Dec. 27
Animal sketches.
I like how these turned out, but I spent a long time (probably about 2 hours) on each one. Most of the time was spent zoomed in really close trying to get good line quality.
Tuesday, Dec. 28
Thumbnail designs for Dark Souls.
Final Dark Souls designs.
Here I chose the elements I like from all the sketches I did and combined them into three different enemy designs.
Final Dark Souls thumbnails.
These are the three designs that I will flesh out into finished paintings. I was only able to finish one (the one on the left) this week.
Dark Souls design, block in.
Environment painting master study.
Wednesday, Dec. 29
Dark Souls design, line drawing.
Color block in.
The colors are much too saturated at this point. I should have started with a black and white value study and then added color. I tried really hard not to just use the eye dropper tool to sample colors from the original Dark Souls concept art.
Animal sketches, 20 min. each.
In an effort to do these drawings faster, I set a timer for 20 minutes for each sketch. This had the effect of making me work harder (I didn’t have time to be lazy or take breaks) and capture the important details quickly. I feel like these are just as strong as the 2 hour sketches from Monday. They’re just not as cleaned up.
Thursday, Dec. 30
Dark Souls design, painting progress.
Environment painting master study progress.
Friday, Dec. 31
Dark Souls design, painting progress.
I spent a long time trying to get the perspective of the shoulder pad right. I know the theory behind tilted planes, but the auxiliary vanishing points were so far away that I ended up eyeballing it.
Saturday, Jan. 01
Finished environment master study (after Andreas Rocha).
I really like this. I didn’t even struggle with it that much. Even though it’s a new medium (digital painting), it’s still just copying shape, value, and edge.
20 minute animal sketches.
Sunday, Jan. 02
Finished Dark Souls design.
I would call this only half done. It could really use another 10–15 hours. As a concept design though, it conveys everything I wanted it to. Hopefully it captures the mood of the dark souls games.
