2D Class Week01 - Basic Shapes from Syd Mead

For this assignment, we were to choose an artwork by Syd Mead and draw out a section of it using basic shapes and shading techniques. After looking at some past student's work for guidance on how to approach this assignment, I chose this work to replicate:

I chose to focus on the vehicle-like object on the left, and started by sketching out the basic shape and sections using the 2B pencil from Nick's Photoshop brush preset pack.

Next, I cleaned up the lines a little bit and reworked some of the overall shaping.

At this point I started playing around with grayscale coloring and shading, blocking in the base colors first, while still trying to pay attention to values.

Smudge tool to mix the colors together better:

Highlights added:

And finally, I smudged the colors again, as well as erased some stray marks and added a shadow beneath the object to give the illusion of hovering in space.

This was a fun exercise, and it still felt a bit challenging to me, keeping things more basic than the intricate painting above, as well as sticking to one color to make myself focus on values rather than being distracted by colors. It was also a little difficult for me to make the decisions for each section of how much detail or simplicity I should aim for. 

I am also not used to using the smudge tool, so that took some trial and error to figure out just how I wanted to use it in order to get the desired effect. Looking at the final two photos, I feel I possibly overused the blur a bit, and probably should aim for more of a middle ground between them in my next work to prevent the end result from looking too "muddy" in texture.